Microsoft kicks off C# 7 language planning

From InfoWorld: Designers are off and running with plans for the next generation of Microsoft’s C# language, with key themes centering on data management, performance, and reliability.

According to meeting notes for the C# team, posted earlier this month on GitHub, the team is looking beyond the planned version 6.0 of the type-safe, object-oriented language. As posted by Microsoft’s Mads Torgerson, a design team member, the notes say: “This is the first design meeting for the version of C# coming after C# 6. We shall colloquially refer to it as C# 7.” Likely themes to investigate for C# 7 include working with data; performance, reliability, and interop; componentization, distribution, and meta programming.

In accordance with theme of working with data, possible C# features could include pattern matching, “denotable” anonymous types, working with common data structures, slicing, and immutability. The notes state that today’s programs are connected and trade in rich, structured data -- what's on the wire, what applications and services produce, manipulate, and consume. Traditional object-oriented languages, while good for many tasks, deal poorly with this setup.

C# builders must look at functional languages to deal with this, the notes stress. “Functional programming languages are often better set up for this: data is immutable (representing information, not state), and is manipulated from the outside, using a freely growable and context-dependent set of functions, rather than a fixed set of built-in virtual methods,” the notes say. C# followers need to keep being inspired by languages including F#, Scala, and Swift.

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