One of the advantages of Unity using Mono and IL2CPP as scripting engines is that any .NET language can be used to code your game or app. Today I’ll show an example of that in the form of F#. How do you go about using an unofficially supported language like this? Read on to for the step-by-step tutorial!
String Concatenation Performance
As programmers, we concatenate strings all the time. Should we worry about the performance? How about the amount of garbage we’re producing for the garbage collector? Today’s article runs a quick test to find out!
Encryption Algorithm Performance
Last week I covered the performance of cryptographic hash algorithms like MD5 and SHA-1. This week I’ll continue by testing the performance of the closely-related encryption algorithms. This includes algorithms like AES, DES, RC2, Rijndael, and TripleDES. Which is fastest? Does the key size, block size, padding mode, or cipher mode matter? Read on to see!
Hash Algorithm Performance
Sooner or later you’ll need to use a cryptographic hash function. Sometimes it’s to quickly check if two large byte arrays are the same, sometimes it’s for interoperability with some server, and other times it’s to obfuscate a string. In any case, performance of the various hash algorithms varies wildly. Today’s article performance tests all 27 hash algorithm permutations to see which is fastest and which is slowest. Read on for the performance test results!
The Magic of LINQ Expressions
LINQ expressions aren’t the same thing as LINQ queries. They’re more like reflection for the syntax of C# itself. It’s a fascinating—and powerful—area of the language and I’ll be exploring it a little in today’s article.
Efficiently Keeping Lists Sorted
List<T> (and SafeList) have a great feature for fast lookups: BinarySearch. However, the list needs to be sorted in order to use it. You could call Sort() first, but that would give back all the performance you got with BinarySearch. It’s better to just keep the list sorted all the time. Unfortunately, there is no function on IList<T>, List<T>, or SafeList to efficiently insert an item into a list that’s already sorted. Today’s article presents an extension function that adds this functionality on to IList<T> and even the non-generic IList so your list will always be sorted for quick lookups with BinarySearch. Read on for the code, unit tests, and a performance test showing the advantages you stand to gain.
SafeList 2.0
The first version of SafeList tried to address a common problem: inserting and removing elements into a List<T> while you loop over it. It had a lot of problems though and ended up being pretty much useless. Today’s article presents SafeList 2.0, a radically-improved version that really solves the problem so you can actually use it as a drop-in replacement for List<T>. Read on for the details, the source code, and even the unit tests that prove it handles all the nasty corner cases for you!
Delegates As Function Pointers: Performance Boost?
C# delegates can be used like function pointers. Assign it once and you don’t have to use an if over and over. But is the overhead of the delegate worth it? Today’s article puts it to the test to see if this a valid performance boost versus just using an if over and over. Read on to see if a delegate is worth your time.
For vs. Foreach
foreach loops are really convenient, but are for loops faster? It’s a simple question, but one that has really wide implications in almost any codebase. Today’s article tests them out to see which is faster for looping over arrays and Lists. Read on to see which is quicker!
How Closures Work
C#’s support for closures includes lambdas ((a, b) => a+b) and delegates (delegate(int a, int b){return a+b;}). They’re extremely handy tools that many developers use on a daily basis. For example, it’s really convenient when using List.Find to pass in a lambda like item => item.Id == IdToFind. They also make great callbacks for asynchronous operations. However you’re using them, understanding how they work behind the scenes will help you understand how they behave and give you insight when optimizing your code. Today’s article delves into the topic to gain just this understanding, so read on to learn some more about closures!