GoingDeep: Peter Sestoft: Inside The C5 Generic Collection Library for C# and CLI

While in Copenhagen recently, I was able to spend some time with computer scientist Peter Sestoft. He's currently a professor at the Copenhagen IT University and he and colleagues have created an awesome collection library for managed code (CLI), C5.

C5 is a library of generic collection classes for C# and other CLI languages and works with Microsoft .Net version 2.0 and Mono version 1.2 and later.

C5 provides functionality and data structures not provided by the standard .Net System.Collections.Generic namespace, such as persistent tree data structures, heap based priority queues, hash indexed array lists and linked lists, and events on collection changes. Also, it is more comprehensive than collection class libraries on other similar platforms, such as Java. Unlike many other collection class libraries, C5 is designed with a strict policy of supporting "code to interface not implementation".

Here, we dig deeply into C5. We also dive into some other interesting computer science and programming topics, as you'd expect. We spend some time discussing a very intriguing aspect oriented software project named YIIHAW. YIIHAW is a static cross-language aspect weaver for .NET. What does that mean? Tune in. Learn.

Peter is a brilliant computer scientist and we're very lucky to have him here on C9. Thank you, Peter!