NativeInterop is live on NuGet

Today I released a first version of my NativeInterop package on NuGet. You can find a description of the purpose and usage of the package as well as the source code on BitBucket.

The motivation to build and release this package really evolved from two practical issues I encountered when building performance critical C# code:

1. Creating a native, high-performance generic array data structure in C# seems to be impossible (see A minimalistic native 64 bit array ...).
2. Reading structured binary data from a byte[] requires some ugly hacks to get both decent performance and genericity (see e.g. Reading Unmanaged Data Into Structures).

The reason for both of these issues is the fact, that C# lacks a "unmanaged" type constraint and thus you cannot express something like

static unsafe T Read<T>(T* p) {
    return *p;
}

But in F#, you can; you'd simply encode this as

open NativeInterop
let pVal = NativePtr.read ptr

where ptr is of type nativeptr<'T> and 'T is constrained to unmanaged types.

The performance offered by the NativeInterop package should be on par with non-generic unsafe C# code. The NativeInterop package also contains an implementation of NativeArray64, but this time without using inline IL. It turned out that in newer versions of the .NET framework, the AGUs are utilized correctly for the address (offset) computation (instead of emitting IMUL instructions): Calling NativePtr.set<'T>/get<'T>/set64<'T>/get64<'T> (or NativePtr.Get/Set or IntPtr.Get/Set or NativePtr.get_Item/set_Item, respectively) should all result in the generation of a single mov instruction.