Proposal for StructureMap 5

EDIT 9/12: Meh, I had a couple twitter exchanges and Gitter questions today that reminded me why I’ve been wanting to walk away from StructureMap. Having to support not just SM but really how SM is used internally inside of tools like ASP.Net MVC Core, MediatR, and half a hundred other frameworks is just wearing me down too much. If anyone else is interested in taking on any of this, I’ll happily help out, but otherwise I think I’m just going to leave this alone. Besides, there’s the new built in IoC in ASP.Net and 30 or so other OSS competitors.

So I’ve been more or less burned out on StructureMap development and support for quite some time (it’s been better lately though). That being said, there’s a ton of people using it (it averages just shy of a 1,000 downloads a day).  It has also been put through the ringer from a lot of users, which remarkably enough, exposes and leads to fixing a lot of bugs and usability problems — and if you don’t believe me, check out this folder of all the tests for bug regressions and fixes.

StructureMap 4.* has a couple ongoing issues that should get addressed some day if the project is going to keep going on:

1. StructureMap has fallen behind many or most of the other IoC containers in the public performance benchmarks. I think those benchmarks are mostly over simplified BS, but still, there’s the pride factor
2. ASP.Net Core DI compliance has been a huge pain in the ass to the point where I’ve openly wondered if the ASP.Net team has purposely tried to sabotage and wipe out all the existing ecosystem of IoC containers in .Net
3. The child container behavior (which I don’t personally use) has been problematic as StructureMap’s more creative users have found several permutations of this and that where the child container model has broken down a bit

So, here’s my thoughts about a possible direction for a future StructureMap 5.0:

• Keep API backwards almost completely backward compatible with StructureMap 4.* except for a few places impacted by the next bullet point
• Completely redesign the internal data structures as a performance optimization. The current structure isn’t terribly different from the very earliest StructureMap versions and there’s absolutely room to cut out some performance fat there
• Take a dependency on Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection.Abstractions and merge in the functionality that today is in StructureMap.Microsoft.DependencyInjection so that it’s easier to get the compliance against ASP.Net Core right by having everything in one place. My thought here too is that we would somehow use their configuration abstractions, but supplemented with the existing StructureMap configuration options somehow as a kind of buddy class extension. Not sure how that one’s gonna work out yet.
• Look for opportunities to make the dynamic Expressions that are built up to actually create objects be more efficient by inlining some operations and generally reducing the number of times it bounces through dictionary structures. I know a lot more about building dynamic Expressions that I did several years ago when I moved StructureMap off of IL generation, so surely there’s some opportunity there

Alright, so my personal conundrum is simply wondering do I care enough to do this as an exercise in crafting performant data structures and micro-optimization, or call StructureMap 4.5 the end of the road and just continue to try to address bugs and user questions for the time being.

I’d kind of like to hear from some StructureMap users or contributors to see how much they’d want the performance and ASP.Net Core compatibility, and then see if anyone would want to help out if we go with this.