Coding for Performance : Delegates

Posted on September 30, 2016 by curryNcode

There are two costs associated with use of delegates: construction and invocation. Invocation, thankfully, is comparable to a normal method call in nearly all circumstances, but delegates are objects and constructing them can be quite expensive. You want to pay this cost only once and cache the result.

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Coding for Performance : Dynamic

Posted on September 30, 2016 by curryNcode

It should probably go without saying, but to make it explicit: any code using the dynamic keyword, or the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) is not going to be highly optimized. Performance tuning is often about stripping away abstractions, but using the DLR is adding one huge abstraction layer. It has its place, certainly, but a fast system is not one of them.
When you use dynamic, what looks like straightforward code is anything but.

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Coding for Performance : Code Generation

Posted on September 30, 2016 by curryNcode

If you find yourself doing anything with dynamically loaded types (e.g., an extension or plugin model), then you need to carefully measure your performance when interacting with those types. Ideally, you can interact with those types via a common interface and avoid most of the issues with dynamically loaded code. This approach is described in Chapter 6 when discussing reflection. If that approach is not possible, use this section to get around the performance problems of invoking dynamically loaded code.

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Coding for Performance : Strings

Posted on September 30, 2016 by curryNcode

In .NET, strings are immutable. Once created, they exist forever in that state until garbage collected. This means that any modification of a string results in creation of a new string. Fast, efficient programs generally do not modify strings in any way. Think about it: strings represent textual data, which is largely for human consumption. Unless your program is specifically for displaying or processing text, strings should be treated like opaque data blobs as much as possible. If you have the choice, always prefer non-string representations of data.

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Coding for Performance : Collections

Posted on September 30, 2016 by curryNcode

.NET provides over 21 built-in collection types, including concurrent and generic versions of many popular data structures. Most programs will only need to use a combination of these and you should rarely need to create your own.

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