Have you ever been struggling with properties that must be able to accept values of various primitive types, such as int, double, or decimal, and return the same value it was put there before? If so, then you probably had to define the type of such property as System.Object which basically meant that all values you pass to that property are boxed and then unboxed. A single boxing operation costs almost nothing, but such operations tend to pile up, inducing a heavy load to the garbage collector (GC).
The NoBox library aims to provide an efficient way to operate with primitive values of different types without a need to cast them to Object or ValueType (thus boxing them). And even though the library is on its earliest beta (or should I say alpha), the first benchmarks look quite promising.
For example, let's have a look at this benchmark. It creates a bunch of primitive objects of 13 different types and put them into a list - either List<System.Object> (with boxing) or List<NoBox.SimpleValue>. On every 1 000 000th iteration the list is cleared, and objects are released.
Results are fascinating: we've gained more than 4x performance improvement!
| Method | Mean | Error | StdDev | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 'Object (boxing)' | 509.2 ms | 10.16 ms | 26.77 ms | 1.00 |
| 'ShortValue (no boxing)' | 125.6 ms | 2.46 ms | 3.11 ms | 0.24 |
In the other benchmark we do not preserve the values between iterations, and they are all consumed by GC in generation 0. This time the effect of boxing/unboxing is negligible, and our custom implementation gives way to built-in types, but the difference is about 20-30%, which we find descent.
| Method | Mean | Error | StdDev | Median | Ratio | RatioSD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 'Object (boxing)' | 75.70 ms | 2.428 ms | 7.044 ms | 80.33 ms | 1.00 | 0.00 |
| 'SimpleValue (no boxing)' | 90.12 ms | 1.594 ms | 1.958 ms | 89.28 ms | 1.23 | 0.11 |