The fourth Community Technology Preview for RyuJIT has been released, and this release brings much awaited expanded operating system support. RyuJIT is the codename for Microsoft's project to improve the .NET Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to provide enhanced performance.
Quickly following the April release of CTP3 which brought support for SIMD instructions, CTP4 adds support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 / 2008 R2 when .NET 4.5.2 is also installed. This is good news for those who wish to test their code running on platforms beyond Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 as until now those were the only operating systems RyuJIT supported.
In his announcement for CTP3, RyuJIT Project Manager Kevin Frei said that overall performance improvements to RyuJIT continue, but mixed performance gains were reported at that time. The big change with CTP4 is the broader OS support and some changes to vector handling (acceleration for most Vector<T> types and all fixed-size vector types are mutuable). Frei promises that many more features and improvements for RyuJIT are under development, but further details have not been released.
For those who are curious to see some code in action, Immo Landwerth, a Program Manager at Microsoft, has provided some sample projects in C# to demonstrate how the SIMD support works.