Upgrade to .NET 8

.NET is a platform upon which EyeAuras is built. It affects all the tiny bits - startup, memory allocation, data management, literally every small bit of the program is affected by this change.

NET8 is not the latest version (there is already a preview of .NET 10), but platform upgrade is not something you do "just because", there must be a reason. I've picked .NET8 (and not .NET9/.NET10) because only for that specific version there is a prototype of a new memory management mechanism, which, from the current tests, just blows out of the water literally everything else that we had in .NET since its inception.

That is one of the primary characteristics of this new mechanism in comparison to what we have now ("workstation-sustainedlowlatency"). Basically this is the duration of those "hiccups" which tend to happen and are in worst cases become noticeable.

Memory VS CPU

Traditionally, there is always a tradeoff when you're developing a system - you can spend less CPU time, but it will cost you some extra memory OR you can save some memory, but it will increase CPU consumption. EyeAuras has almost always been picking the first option - memory is cheap and cpu cycles are expensive in consumer PCs (purely my opinion). But, aligning to that strategy also means that any improvements in the very core of memory management system should affect us greatly and that memory management mechanism seems to be a perfect fit. We'll see how it goes, but I am expecting to achieve a measurable performance jump in the nearest future.

Bugfixes/Improvements

• [Scripting] Added ScriptContainerExtension prototype - there will be a separate article on this later. For now it is in alpha-stage.