Akka.NET v1.6 Preview - Oct 2026 Community Standup

Akka.NET 1.6 is here in beta — and it's the biggest change to the runtime in years. In this standup, Aaron Stannard walks through what's landed in the 1.6 line so far, with a live demo of all three flagship features: Source-generated serialization — a Roslyn source generator that builds MessagePack formatters at compile time. No reflection, no runtime registration, AOT-safe. Native AOT support — publish a real ActorSystem with PublishAot=true and no trim or AOT warnings from the Akka code in use. High-performance remoting — the new Artery TCP transport, built on Akka.Streams, running alongside classic DotNetty remoting. We also cover what 1.6 breaks: .NET 10 only, ByteString removed, HOCON-from-config removed, and Artery is not wire-compatible with classic remoting — so a mixed cluster won't work. Important: this is beta3, not GA. The 1.6.0 milestone is still dominated by Serialization V2 completion, and Native AOT support is in progress — classic remoting, Akka.Cluster, and cluster tools don't work under AOT yet. Since the last standup we shipped 3 core releases (v1.5.71 → v1.5.73) and 3 public betas of 1.6 (beta1 → beta3). ⚠️ If you tried beta2, upgrade to beta3. A manifest bug made persistence writes unrecoverable on beta2. THE ASK: turn Artery on in a non-production cluster and tell us what breaks. akka.remote.artery.enabled = on Demo repo: https://github.com/Aaronontheweb/akka... Getting started: https://github.com/akkadotnet/akka.ne... Breaking changes: https://github.com/akkadotnet/akka.ne... Native AOT docs: https://github.com/akkadotnet/akka.ne... beta3 release notes: https://github.com/akkadotnet/akka.ne... Have an Akka.NET use case to share? We're always looking for Show and Tell presenters: https://forms.gle/zR1K2pygCFhdCG7v5 Akka.NET docs: https://getakka.net Discord:   / discord   Petabridge training and support: https://petabridge.com 0:00 Welcome & October 1.5.x Maintenance Releases 3:14 What's New in Akka.NET 1.6: Overview 8:41 AOT Compilation Support 18:21 The New Serialization Architecture 29:50 Source-Generated Serializers in Action 41:07 Live Demo: AOT Chat Application 47:07 Artery Transport: Performance & Architecture 55:24 Configuring Artery & Code Walkthrough 56:54 What's Still to Come: TLS, QUIC & AOT 59:19 Try the Beta & Closing