Warning
DEPRECATED: This library is no longer recommended. Since .NET 8, you can use inline arrays which serve the same purpose as this library but are officially supported by the runtime and guaranteed to work across all platforms.
A collection of fixed-size structs which can be treated as Span
s. A replacement for stackalloc
(or fixed
-size buffers), but these buffers can contain reference types (and can't be dynamically sized).
void Copy(TextReader reader, TextWriter writer)
{
// Allocate 2kB on the stack
var buffer = new FixedSizeBuffer1024<char>();
var span = buffer.AsSpan();
var count = -1;
while (count != 0)
{
count = reader.Read(span);
writer.Write(span.Slice(count));
}
buffer.Dispose();
}
Buffers are provided in powers-of-two lengths, from 2 to 8192.
Use of this library is potentially unsafe. When calling AsSpan
or AsReadOnlySpan
, you must make sure the Span
doesn't outlive the FixedSizeBuffer
. Basically, don't return the Span
.
Span<int> Bad()
{
var buffer = new FixedSizeBuffer4<int>();
return buffer.AsSpan(); // Don't do this
}
You can safely pass around spans into buffers which live on the heap — but if you're doing that you might as well use an array.