Hello, I am Laszlo

JsonMergePatch and .NET6

12/18/2021

In a previous post I have shown how JsonMergePatch library can be used with console and Asp.Net Core applications.

In this post I will focus on using it with the source generator hand-in-hand of System.Text.Json. Before getting into the details, a new [Patchable] attribute is introduced ease the work:

Patchable

Certain use-cases require to generate wrapper types with the source generation for assemblies that do not directly use Patch<T> (where T is the wrapped source type). This could be a reason for having separate assemblies for entity types, or because of the need of stacking multiple source generators on top of each other.In this case types may be attributed with [Patchable] attribute:

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WaitAsync

11/21/2021

.NET 6 has a new method added to System.Threading.Tasks.Task to wait for a task completion or timeout. WaitAsync method completes with the result of the task it is invoked on, or throws a timeout exception when the given timeout reached or throws a TaskCancelledException if the given cancellation token is set to cancelled state.

The method's primary use-case is to add cancellation or timeout ability for async methods, that inherently don't provide such capability. One use-case could be unit tests, where we explicitly want to time out and fail a test if the method invoked as the system under test is an async operation without a timeout overload. This way we can let other tests to be executed in the test suite.

Previously a poor man (woman)'s implementation for such timeout could look as:

public static async Task<T> TimeoutAfter<T>(this Task<T> task, TimeSpan timeout)
{
    if (task.IsCompleted)
        return await task;
    var cts = new CancellationTokenSource();
    if (task == await Task.WhenAny(task, Task.Delay(timeout, cts.Token)))
    {
        cts.Cancel();
        return await task;
    }
    else
    {
        throw new TimeoutException();
    }
}

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Math Sin with SIMD

10/31/2021

Introduction

In this post I will look into how someone can implement Sin/Cosin functions with SIMD in NET 5. NET 5 does not have a wrapper on SIMD trigonometric functions, so it seems a good exercise to implement it.

Using SIMD, one may gain performance advantage on large data sets. Later in this post I will run a performance benchmark to compare the SIMD implementation with Math.Cos() and MathF.Cos() methods.

Considerations

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String Interpolation and StringBuilder in .NET6

09/26/2021

In a previous post I have looked into what are the performance characteristics of creating interpolated string in .NET 5 and early previews of .NET 6. With .NET 6 preview 7 or better a new approach is used by the C# compiler with support from the BCL to build interpolated strings.

Fortunately the new way provides a faster approach for the most convenient ways for assembling strings, however it makes my previous post completely obsolete.

For details about the new way DefaultInterpolatedStringHandler builds strings, read: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/string-interpolation-in-c-10-and-net-6/

Re-running the benchmarks from the previous post, shows much better memory usage:

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String Interpolation and StringBuilder

09/25/2021

This post looks into different approaches and their performance characteristics for appendnng interpolated like strings. I use BenchmarkDotNet to benchmark the different solutions. In case of all benchmarks I have 3 string properties A, B and C each holding one of these values:

• hello

• world

• how are you

The values of these variables are set in a Global setup step of BencharmarkDotNet. In all benchmarks the three string are concatenate with some punctuations.

Implementation

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