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Singularity achieves good performance by reinventing the environment in which code executes. In existing systems, safe code is an exotic newcomer who lives in a huge, luxurious home in an elegant, gated community with its own collection of services. Singularity, in contrast, has architected a single world in which everyone can be safe, with performance comparable to the unsafe world of existing systems.

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A key starting point is Singularity processes, which start empty and add features only as required. Modern language runtimes come with huge libraries and expressive, dynamic language features such as reflection. This richness comes at a price. Features such as code access security or reflection incur massive overhead, even when never used.

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A Singularity application specifies which libraries it needs, and the Bartok compiler brings together the code and eliminates unneeded functionality through a process called "tree shaking," which deletes unused classes, methods, and even fields. As a result, a simple C# "Hello World" process in Singularity requires less memory than the equivalent C/C++ program running on most UNIX or Windows® systems. Moreover, Bartok translates from Microsoft® intermediate language (MSIL) into highly optimized x86 code. It performs interprocedural optimization to eliminate redundant run-time safety tests, reducing the cost of language safety.

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From the same way one knows about the performance of any processor before it's built-- software simulation

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at 8 cores, the results are less impressive---about a 3.5X speedup