The C5 Generic Collection Library for C# and CLI

This book describes the C5 library of generic collection classes (or container classes) for the C# programming language and other generics-enabled languages on version 2.0 of the CLI platform, as implemented by Microsoft .Net and the Mono project. The C5 library provides a wide range of classic data structures, rich functionality, the best possible asymptotic time complexity, documented performance, and a thoroughly tested implementation. The overall goal is for C5 to be a generic collection library for the C# programming language and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) whose functionality, efficiency and quality meets or exceeds what is available for similar contemporary programming platforms. The design has been influenced by the collection libraries for Java and Smalltalk and the published critique of these. However, it contains functionality and a regularity of design that considerably exceeds that of the standard libraries for those languages.

The implementation of the C5 generic collection library is available in source and binary form from http://www.itu.dk/research/c5/.