> This is another great example of a developer caring a lot about a particular area of .NET and helping to make it better for their own needs and for everyone else that might be using it.
This is a great, succinct, non-ideological explanation for why open-source projects where anyone can contribute tend to be better. For a given component/function, there might be only a single person in the entire world who needs that optimized badly enough to actually do it themselves, but once they do, everyone benefits. A closed-source team has to prioritize their development efforts, which means niche improvements will probably never make it in. Multiply this by a thousand different niches, and the product is going to be slower.
We (TechEmpower) had this in mind when we created our framework benchmarks project a few years back. Performance improvements in platforms and frameworks have the potential of very broad impact. With our project, we wanted to provide some inspiration for doing that kind of performance tuning. We had found ourselves in many conversations about how many real-world CRUD web applications take multiple seconds to render a page with a form. We realized that if, just as an example, the JSON serializer or template engine were substantially faster, many real-world applications that use those components would see notable improvements to their user experience.
This is a great, succinct, non-ideological explanation for why open-source projects where anyone can contribute tend to be better. For a given component/function, there might be only a single person in the entire world who needs that optimized badly enough to actually do it themselves, but once they do, everyone benefits. A closed-source team has to prioritize their development efforts, which means niche improvements will probably never make it in. Multiply this by a thousand different niches, and the product is going to be slower.