tl;dr Use Span to work with ANY kind of memory in a safe and very efficient way. Simplify your APIs and use the full power of unmanaged memory!
Contents
Introduction
Introduction
C# gives us great flexibility when it comes to using different kinds of memory. But the majority of the developers use only the managed one. Let’s take a brief look at what C# has to offer for us:
Stack memory - allocated on the Stack with the stackalloc keyword. Very fast allocation and deallocation. The size of the Stack is very small (usually < 1 MB) and fits well into CPU cache. But when you try to allocate more, you get StackOverflowException which can not be handled and immediately kills the entire process. Usage is also limited by the very short lifetime of the stack - when the method ends, the stack gets unwinded together with its memory. Stackalloc is commonly used for short operations that must not allocate any managed memory. An example is very fast logging of ETW events in corefx: it ha