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I've said it before, but this is one of the few times I've used it in a critical codepath.
PS: I'm using enumeration because we're talking about .NET. If I started talking about iterators in .NET parlance that's a C# compiler feature.
Iterators and iterating are terms I'd use if we were talking about C++. You may not agree with my terminology but I tend to choose it with some deliberation.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
modified 18-Jan-24 21:50pm.
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You "think"?
We do not think, we measure. If you say that you think, you think that you think.
Measure or shut the elephant op.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Of course it's slower. The IEnumerable interface expects a class with methods you have to call to maintain which item in the IEnumerable implementor you're looking at.
Calling methods adds overhead, and plenty of it compared to the overhead of an index variable, which you know is just pointer math.
Enumerable being slower is not surprising at all. Just don't use it where you don't have to, and that includes LINQ because it's heavily dependent on the IEnumerable interfaces.
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IList<t> uses methods as well. Virtual calls and everything. There is no direct array access through IList<t> afaik
So the primary difference between IEnumerable<t> and IList<t> is the creation of a new object to traverse the former.
Microsoft appears to believe that object creation is very cheap in .NET, and everything I've read from them suggests they practically think it's free. It's not.
That was 30% gain in performance.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Well, the first call (GetEnumerator) definitely has a penalty, but each retrieval after that (each call to the enumerator) may be as quick as an indexed access... or it may not be.
Anyway, I agree with -- if you know you're iterating across an array, use array access instead.
And don't use Linq.
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Just to be difficult, I'd argue that an Enumerator - even a special cased one like the implementation on System.String will be slower than indexed access.
The reason being is that it's necessary to execute an additional call to MoveNext() for each advance, whereas with indexed access you are simply incrementing a value. You must then call Current to get the actual value.
I haven't benchmarked it, but I'd be very surprised if this was not the case.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Upvoted and sorry.
It is a decision. Do you want the best in speed? Or do you just need to get things done and be readable?
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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You did the timing in debug mode, I assume? I always suspected that the compiler might optimize such things at release time, but no?
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Nope, that was release build. My code actually warns me if I run the benchmarks in debug, because I do it by mistake so often.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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If I don't care about access performance in general I will use IEnumerable<T> if I can rather than a collection.
The reason being is (A) I don't like to impose functionality I'm not going to use and enumerating a collection is the same as enumerating with IEnumerable. (B) Lazy loading isn't really doable with collections in most circumstances because of the presence of count. (C) Collections provide methods to modify them. I certainly don't like suggesting I will modify something I won't, so if i can take the immutable version for a read only function i will. (D) unbounded collections are not supported by .NET collections. You must know the count ahead of time.
My choice of switching to IList was improved index access performance. ICollection doesn't provide that.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Well, yes, and no. The answer is it depends on which Framework and version that you are using.
This video will expand on this: Microsoft FINALLY fixed foreach loops in .NET 7 - YouTube[^]
Graeme
"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee
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That's interesting! I'm currently targeting .NET 6 but I will keep that in mind. Thanks.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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It's a simple move from .Net 6.* to to .Net 8.* too... I feel sorry for those stuck in the .Net Framework world, they lose out on all of the performance improvements, in most cases, by simply switching and recompiling.
Graeme
"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee
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Waaaa!
I'm stuck in the framework right now.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I recently made my Visual FA solution target the .NET Framework in addition to Core and Standard.
So I have VisualFA.csproj and VisualFA.DNF.csproj. The latter is the same project but for DNF. All the source files are linked via "Add as link" from the first project so I only have one copy. I then use a conditional compilation constant to add or remove the use of spans in code since .NET framework and as far as I can tell, VB.NET don't support them.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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VB.Net supports both frameworks. If you look at my most recent articles, here on CodeProject, I support C# & VB.Net on .Net Core & .Net Frsmework.
However, almost 12 months ago, there was a change. This Microsoft blog post explains: Update to the .NET language strategy - .NET Blog[^]
Graeme
"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee
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I realize it supports both frameworks.
I'm saying it doesn't seem to support spans, and I don't think ReadOnlySpan is marked obsolete, but I haven't looked
'ReadOnlySpan(Of Char)' is obsolete: 'Types with embedded references are not supported in this version of your compiler.'.
Does not compile. I get the above
Private Function _BlockEnd0(ByVal s As ReadOnlySpan(Of Char), ByVal cp As Integer, ByVal len As Integer, ByVal position As Integer, ByVal line As Integer, ByVal column As Integer) As FAMatch
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Yes, covered in that blog post. However, a C# facade library can address that limitation. Performace wise, VB.Net is just as fast as C# on both frameworks. My latest JSON Streaming[^] article has the benchmarks to prove it. That too uses ReadOnlySpan and ref strut with async/await . I mention the VB.Net limitation in the article. Sadly, I think that the article was too much for most readers.
Graeme
"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee
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That's great for your situation. In my current scenario this code was generated by a tool, and specifically designed to be able to produce dependency free code. I might actually consider the facade idea though for when it is opted to rely on the runtimes - right now the VB code can't under the newer frameworks unless you turn off spans in the compiled runtime itself - the build - not at runtime - it's conditionally compiled in. So that facade may fix that issue.
And yet otherwise in my tests, the spanless string approach i use (Substring instead of Splice) doesn't yield noticeably less performance. That leads me to suspect I'm not using it to its fullest - an encouraging thought in the big picture because it means I can get even more speed out of it. I'm not sure that's possible though because no matter how I think about approaching it a copy is always necessary by the time you hit the Value property off FAMatch . It's a head scratcher.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Quote: And yet otherwise in my tests, the spanless string approach i use (Substring instead of Splice) doesn't yield noticeably less performance. That leads me to suspect I'm not using it to its fullest - an encouraging thought in the big picture because it means I can get even more speed out of it. I'm not sure that's possible though because no matter how I think about approaching it a copy is always necessary by the time you hit the Value property off FAMatch. It's a head scratcher.
Without knowing specifics, it is difficult to comment.
That article is about dealing with gigabytes of data using streams efficiently keeping allocations to a minimum. There was a lot of research, trial & error done to find the best optimal solution. I even looked at the source code of Microsoft's latest (At the time) .Net Core. Renting ReadOnlyMemory<t>[^] was not suitable as all memory blocks needed to be of the same size otherwise nulls fill the gaps. This is not documented anywhere! And I did look. That was a real headscratcher at the time.
Don't get me started on ref strut in an asynchronous environment...
I'm sure if you take a step back, do a bit of research, experimenting, digging into the Microsoft code, you will find a solution.
Graeme
"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee
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I feel like it might be chasing ghosts, particularly since I already get really great performance out of the thing, especially compared to .NET Regex even though that always uses ReadOnlySpan. I still beat it by 3x in the best case.
Microsoft Regex "Lexer": [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 35ms
Microsoft Regex compiled "Lexer": [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 20ms
FAStringRunner (proto): [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 7ms
FATextReaderRunner: (proto) [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 13ms
FAStringDfaTableRunner: [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 10ms
FATextReaderDfaTableRunner: [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 14ms
FAStringStateRunner (NFA): [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 145ms
FAStringStateRunner (Compact NFA): [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 43ms
FATextReaderStateRunner (Compact NFA): [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 48ms
FAStringStateRunner (DFA): [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 11ms
FATextReaderStateRunner (DFA): [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 16ms
FAStringRunner (Compiled): [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 7ms
FATextReaderRunner (Compiled): [■■■■■■■■■■] 100% Found 220000 matches in 12ms
7ms is about what I get compared to microsoft's 20 if I'm making the fairest comparison possible (apples vs apples) 'cept mine doesn't backtrack or support a bunch of fluff. (though it lacks anchors )
If I can't get another 10% out of this I don't think it's worth the trouble.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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That is impressive.
Have you seen the latest updates to RegEx ? Regular Expression Improvements in .NET 7 - .NET Blog[^] ... Source Generators for RegEx are next level!
I would dig into the source code for the changes to the RegEx and the Source Generator for RegEx and see how they do it to get ideas for yours.
Quote: If I can't get another 10% out of this I don't think it's worth the trouble.
I hear you, and for a one-off can agree, however, you will need to understand that last 10% for future projects. The question is now or then?
Graeme
"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee
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That's actually targeting Microsoft's .NET 7 implementation, and yeah I've looked at their source generator and considered making my own using the same tech. Right now I'm using the CodeDOM for that, which is older, but doesn't require near as much buy in in terms of your install base. For instance, you don't need compiler services running, and I'm not even sure how compatible it is with DNF and there are other unknowns. I need to do more research.
I actually did dotNetPeek them which is how I figured out the Span stuff. I don't like their code. Frankly, I'm impressed with the code-synthesis but they still made it hard to follow, and I'm not sure if that's so beneficial. My code looks machine generated, but it's easy to follow, as state machines go:
private FAMatch _BlockEnd0(ReadOnlySpan<char> s, int cp, int len, int position, int line, int column) {
q0:
if ((cp == 42)) {
this.Advance(s, ref cp, ref len, false);
goto q1;
}
goto errorout;
q1:
if ((cp == 47)) {
this.Advance(s, ref cp, ref len, false);
goto q2;
}
goto errorout;
q2:
return FAMatch.Create(0, s.Slice(position, len).ToString(), position, line, column);
errorout:
if ((cp == -1)) {
return FAMatch.Create(-1, s.Slice(position, len).ToString(), position, line, column);
}
this.Advance(s, ref cp, ref len, false);
goto q0;
}
private FAMatch NextMatchImpl(ReadOnlySpan<char> s) {
int ch;
int len;
int p;
int l;
int c;
ch = -1;
len = 0;
if ((this.position == -1)) {
this.position = 0;
}
p = this.position;
l = this.line;
c = this.column;
this.Advance(s, ref ch, ref len, true);
if ((ch == 47)) {
this.Advance(s, ref ch, ref len, false);
goto q1;
}
goto errorout;
q1:
if ((ch == 42)) {
this.Advance(s, ref ch, ref len, false);
goto q2;
}
goto errorout;
q2:
return _BlockEnd0(s, ch, len, p, l, c);
errorout:
if (((ch == -1)
|| (ch == 47))) {
if ((len == 0)) {
return FAMatch.Create(-2, null, 0, 0, 0);
}
return FAMatch.Create(-1, s.Slice(p, len).ToString(), p, l, c);
}
this.Advance(s, ref ch, ref len, false);
goto errorout;
}
Main thing that makes it tough is the use of UTF-32 codepoints instead of chars - necessary for surrogate handling in a seamless manner. I originally used char literals for the transitions but that was incompatible with VB.NET source generation. Frankly, VB.NET is an utter curmudgeon in terms of what it will accept and I hate creating language agnostic code templates that can target it. I always ALWAYS have to massage them for VB.NET.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Quote: I actually did dotNetPeek them
In my experience, I have found peeking and looking at the actual source code is not always the same thing. The compiler tends to optimise and rewrite code these days...
Graeme
"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee
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