Basic usage

[silkfire]

I just recently discovered your library as an alternative to using BinaryReader and it looks really promising. Unfortunately the usage isn't very obvious to me; would you care to guide me how I would use your library coming from a BinaryReader background?

What is the use for Put/Big/Write/Read?

What would the equivalent of the constructor be:

var br = new BinaryReader(ms) {
  ...
}

It also seems like you haven't turned on the option to publish the documentation XML with the NuGet package. This means that there are no comments (IntelliSense) on the methods when using it as a NuGet dependency in a project.

[M-Pixel]

It seems I neglected to include code samples in the readme. At this point, I have a handful of projects that I can pull examples from, so I'll put that on my to-do list. In the meantime, you can take a look at this: https://dev.to/mpixel/fastestbinarystream-3102

Feel free to post a few snippets of BinaryReader code and I'd be happy to translate.

Thanks for bringing the documentation issue to my attention. I'm not very familiar with NuGet yet. I'll look into that as soon as I'm done with taxes (next week). If you have any pointers, feel free to let me know.

[silkfire]

I was actually able to figure it out on my own after reading the source code thoroughly 😁
Quite happy with the library so far, much faster than using FileStream + BinaryReader.
I did discover a serious bug though. Also, the version on NuGet differs quite a bit from the one in GitHub.
In your Read<T> method, you have hardcoded the T as a short, meaning the head will always be advanced by the size of a short.

I've fixed that and added some extra methods of convenience in a version of my own. Can post a PR later if you'd like. For example, I added methods that return Span and methods that read and then write directly into an array at a given position.

The fluent design isn't always of convenience, sometimes you just want to return the data you've read instead of the BinaryStream object.

[M-Pixel]

Thanks for catching the bug, and feel free to PR. I'll post new issues for the sake of organization.

If there are any examples you're willing and able to share, I'd be very interested to see how you're using it!

[silkfire]

No worries! After putting some more time into it, I finished porting my method to use FastestBinaryStream.
So then I benchmarked it, but I quickly ran into problems as the run was never able to finish. Turns out I had a serious memory leak in the code that would eat up all my memory in just 10 seconds.
It looks like I forgot to use the Dispose method on the object. But after trying that out, I got an exception every time.

The Marshal.Release method seems to be some obscure method which shouldn't be used according to the official docs. After changing it to Marshal.FreeHGlobal I got it to work.

My results were that FBS is 37% faster than using MemoryStream + BinaryReader 😁
And the library I'm building to optimize an existing one is 1000x faster than the reference 😊

Hopefully will have time to make a PR tonight.

[M-Pixel]

The Marshal.Release method seems to be some obscure method which shouldn't be used according to the official docs. After changing it to Marshal.FreeHGlobal I got it to work.

This is fixed as of 3cb33ae.