Using Loyc.Essentials: introduction

Loyc.Essentials is a library (DLL) of general-purpose code that supplements the .NET BCL (standard libraries). I hope that one day it will serve as a starting point or inspiration for a multi-language standard library, which will be a standard library that you can use in a wide variety of programming languages (including outside the .NET ecosystem). Currently, however, Loyc.Essentials is designed specifically for .NET, and it is designed to supplement, not replace, the core BCL classes. The Loyc libraries contain only "safe", verifiable code.

Loyc.Essentials contains the following categories of stuff:

• Collection stuff: interfaces, adapters, helper classes, base classes, extension methods, and implementations for simple "core" collections.
• Geometry: simple generic geometric interfaces and classes: e.g. IPoint<T>, IPoint3<T>, Vector<T>, Vector3<T>, IRectangle<T>, LineSegment<T>, BoundingBox<T>
• Math: generic math interfaces that allow arithmetic to be performed in generic code, based on math interfaces originally designed by Rüdiger Klaehn. Also includes fixed-point types, 128-bit integer math, and handy extra math functions in MathEx.
• Other utilities: message sinks (IMessageSink), object tags (ITags, HashTags), ICloneable<T>, interface adapter generation, Localization (Localize class), Symbol, threading stuff, a miniture clone of NUnit (MiniTest, RunTests), a pluggable internationalization mechanism (Localize class), EzStopwatch, WeakReference<T>, extra general-purpose exception types derived from InvalidOperationException (e.g. InvalidStateException, ReadOnlyException) and miscellaneous low-level functionality including more extension methods.
• Compatibility: a very small amount of .NET 4.5 stuff, backported to .NET 4.0 (I'm thinking about using a separate DLL for this, maybe using Theraot's libraries)

In the coming days I plan to write a series of blog posts about this and other Loyc libraries.

• Part 1: collection interfaces