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.

BinaryBufferReader
Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Ratio
BinaryReader_ReadInt	42.23 ms	0.1487 ms	0.1318 ms	baseline
BufferReader_ReadInt	5.53 ms	0.0265 ms	0.0221 ms	-89%
BinaryReader_ReadDecimal	48.28 ms	0.2038 ms	0.1906 ms	baseline
BufferReader_ReadDecimal	34.75 ms	0.3921 ms	0.3476 ms	-28%
BinaryReader_ReadFloat	25.76 ms	0.1012 ms	0.0947 ms	baseline
BufferReader_ReadFloat	3.75 ms	0.0209 ms	0.0195 ms	-92%

BinaryBufferWriter
Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Ratio
BinaryWriter_WriteInt	62.71 ms	0.5090 ms	0.4761 ms	baseline
BufferWriter_WriteInt	11.05 ms	0.0307 ms	0.0240 ms	-77%
BinaryWriter_WriteDecimal	42.07 ms	0.1556 ms	0.1455 ms	baseline
BufferWriter_WriteDecimal	7.79 ms	0.0191 ms	0.0169 ms	-84%
BinaryWriter_WriteFloat	33.38 ms	0.1869 ms	0.1561 ms	baseline
BufferWriter_WriteFloat	7.79 ms	0.0191 ms	0.0169 ms	-84%

Performance tests were generated using .NET 7.0.5 on:

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