Roadmap for GenHTTP 11

[Kaliumhexacyanoferrat]

As GenHTTP aligns with the release cycle of .NET, GenHTTP 11 will be released in November 2026. This post summarizes the roadmap for this version. Feel free to comment and add your wishes and remarks for this new version.

Code Generation

In previous versions of GenHTTP, all dynamic web service frameworks used reflection to generate the responses at runtime. This required a lot of generic code to be executed to gather input and to convert the output of the service methods, and the execution via MethodInfo.Invoke() is horribly slow and prevents GenHTTP projects from being AoT compiled. Over the next months, code generation will be added to the GenHTTP 10.x releases as an optional opt-in feature. In GenHTTP 11, we will switch to code generation as the default way of providing web services. This change will bring the performance of the service frameworks to the same level as pure IHandler instances.

New API Model

In recent versions of GenHTTP, we started a trend to integrate into other runtimes via engines and adapters. This trend decouples the development framework from the actual HTTP runtime. In the future, GenHTTP will probably focus more on the framework functionality and partner with actual HTTP implementations via adapters and engines. This allows us to benefit from high performance HTTP implementations while giving us the time to focus on the actual functionality.

To embrace this change, the GenHTTP API will be simplified in version 11 to require less work from adapters and engines. Furthermore, the contracts will be changed to modern concepts such as read-only memory and duplex pipes, leveraging the performance of the underlying HTTP implementations.

Depending on the maturity of the engines available in Q3/2026 we might drop the internal engine alltogether in GenHTTP 11, but this has not been decided yet.

Ongoing Changes

As always, we will accept upcoming feature requests and provide an implementation, if possible. Nevertheless, besides the two big topics above, no larger content changes are planned for GenHTTP 11.