Recently, the renowned international open-source community, .NET, announced support for LoongArch. Now, the LoongArch64 architecture has been integrated into the main branch of the .NET community.

.NET is a free, cross-platform, and open-source developer platform for creating different types of applications. On .NET, developers can use a variety of languages, editors, and libraries to build the Web, mobile and desktop apps, games, and IoT. Native support from the .NET community implies that the LoongArch64 architecture will develop in sync with the community and that the software ecosystem on the .NET development platform can be ported and run on the LoongArch64 platform. This marks a significant step in constructing the LoongArch ecosystem, which represents China's contribution to the development of international open-source software.

Over the past two years, the .NET development platform has evolved rapidly. Now, it has versions .NET6-LTS and .NET7-Preview3, which boost significant progress in both performance and unification across multiple platforms and frameworks. As more and more .NET projects are upgraded to higher versions, especially the .NET6-LTS version, many Loongson users urgently require these advanced .NET deployments on the LoongArch platform.

In September 2021, Loongson Technology submitted a LoongArch support plan to the .NET community, initiating the work of obtaining native support for LoongArch from the .NET community. In December 2021, Loongson submitted the complete source code of LoongArch to the community. Since then, the company has maintained close communication with the community and conducted detailed reviews, in-depth discussions, and multiple rounds of revisions and iterations on the source code of LoongArch64 with their developers. In April 2022, all foundational runtime architecture code passed the community's technical review and was integrated into the main development branch, making LoongArch a brand-new CPU architecture natively supported by the .NET community.

To date, the self-developed LoongArch ISA has received support from .NET, GCC, LLVM, FFmpeg, UEFI (UEFI specifications and ACPI specifications), as well as the domestic open-source communities such as OpenAnolis and openEuler. Thanks to their joint efforts, the LoongArch ecosystem can develop steadily in various aspects.

At present, Loongson Technology has completed the development of the .NET6/LoongArch version and enabled the architecture to support Avalonia, a UI development framework. Many customers have deployed .NET6/LoongArch in their products, and the architecture is performing well.