BinaryBuffers

BinaryBuffers offers a highly performant implementation of BinaryReader and BinaryWriter, working directly on a byte array, thus eliminating the need for an intermediate Stream object.

How to use

BinaryBufferReader and BinaryBufferWriter are the respective names of the reader and writer. Both classes operate on a byte[] as its underlying data buffer.

// Provide a buffer to the reader/writer
var buffer = new byte[100];

// Write to the buffer
var writer = new BinaryBufferWriter(buffer);

writer.Write(2022);
writer.Write(8.11);

// Read from the buffer
var reader = new BinaryBufferReader(buffer);

var year = reader.ReadInt32();
var time = reader.ReadDouble();

Additional Goodies

Use StreamBufferWriter as a drop in replacement for BinaryWriter to gain ~10% improvement in performance.

Use StreamBufferReader as a drop in replacement for BinaryReader. Note that there is no performance benefit in using StreamBufferReader, it just helps widen the use of IBufferReader.

Use ResetBuffer method in BinaryBufferReader and BinaryBufferWriter instead of creating a new one and have less allocations!

Benchmarks

Benchmarks shows up to 92% improvement in writing and 84% in reading.

Performance tests were generated using .NET 7.0.5 on:

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 1 CPU, 24 logical and 12 physical cores