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Overview

Publishing as Native AOT produces a self-contained app that has been ahead-of-time compiled into native code.

Advantages:

  • Faster startup time
  • Smaller memory footprint

Limitations:

  • Availability:
    • GA: .NET 7: Console applications only
    • Preview: ASP.NET Core 8
  • All limitations of trimming apply.
  • All limitations of single-file deployments apply.
  • No dynamic loading (Assembly.LoadFile)
  • No runtime code generation (System.Reflection.Emit)
  • Apps include required runtime libraries (like all self-contained apps), so their size is larger than framework-dependent apps.

Requirements

  • On Windows, Desktop Development w/C++ workload
  • On Linux, clang, zlib1g-ev

Publishing

  1. Update the project file: SomeProject.csproj
    <PublishAot>true</PublishAot>
  2. Publish the app for a specific runtime identifier:
    dotnet publish -r <RUNTIME-IDENTIFIER> -c Release

Native Libraries

This capability also allows for publishing .NET class libraries that can be consumed from non-.NET languages.

AOT-Compatibility Analyzers

Availability: .NET 8

Use the IsAotCompatible property to provide analyzers for AOT compatibility:
SomeProject.csproj

<PropertyGroup>
    <IsAotCompatible>true</IsAotCompatible>
</PropertyGroup>