How do the major C# DI/IoC frameworks compare?

While a comprehensive answer to this question takes up hundreds of pages of my book, here's a quick comparison chart that I'm still working on:

A table explaining difference between several DICs


I came across another performance comparison(latest update 10 April 2014). It compares the following:

  • AutoFac
  • LightCore (site is German)
  • LinFu
  • Ninject
  • Petite
  • Simple Injector (the fastest of all contestants)
  • Spring.NET
  • StructureMap
  • Unity
  • Windsor
  • Hiro

Here is a quick summary from the post:

Conclusion

Ninject is definitely the slowest container.

MEF, LinFu and Spring.NET are faster than Ninject, but still pretty slow. AutoFac, Catel and Windsor come next, followed by StructureMap, Unity and LightCore. A disadvantage of Spring.NET is, that can only be configured with XML.

SimpleInjector, Hiro, Funq, Munq and Dynamo offer the best performance, they are extremely fast. Give them a try!

Especially Simple Injector seems to be a good choice. It's very fast, has a good documentation and also supports advanced scenarios like interception and generic decorators.

You can also try using the Common Service Selector Library and hopefully try multiple options and see what works best for you.

Some informtion about Common Service Selector Library from the site:

The library provides an abstraction over IoC containers and service locators. Using the library allows an application to indirectly access the capabilities without relying on hard references. The hope is that using this library, third-party applications and frameworks can begin to leverage IoC/Service Location without tying themselves down to a specific implementation.

Update

13.09.2011: Funq and Munq were added to the list of contestants. The charts were also updated, and Spring.NET was removed due to it's poor performance.

04.11.2011: "added Simple Injector, the performance is the best of all contestants".


Just read this great .Net DI container comparison blog by Philip Mat.

He does some thorough performance comparison tests on;

  • Autofac
  • StructureMap
  • Ninject
  • Unity
  • Castle.Windsor
  • Spring.Net

He recommends Autofac as it is small, fast, and easy to use ... I agree. It appears that Unity and Ninject are the slowest in his tests.

Tags:

C#

Dependency Injection

Unity Container

Ioc Container

Ninject

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