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by gnabgib 803 days ago
If you (a consuming dev) want the world's smallest (in your code) - use the .net built in parser[0]. Bonus, it's RFC4180 compliant.

If you (competing/learning) want to write the world's smallest (code golf style)... this isn't it, and has some weird superfluous lines (if that's your measure - per the original question).

If you (learning) want to write an efficient parser.. this isn't it. You don't need a StringBuilder, you can seek the Stream to collect the (already formed) strings directly from source vs char-by-char memory copy and rebuild. Yes; that limits your stream choices, but since the example/tests only use FileStreams (which are seekable) you might not come across other kinds. If you need to use un-seekable streams, then you'll need to use a large enough buffer.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.visua...
1 comments
neonsunset 803 days ago
This is not a correct link (it refers to VB.NET). There are better parsers out there (Sep).

I'm not sure what is your point but it certainly misses the idea behind this HN submission and makes me sad as it would be nice to see words of encouragement in .NET submissions here instead.

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int_19h 803 days ago
It's an assembly with "Microsoft.VisualBasic" in the name, but it shipped as part of every version of .NET to date, and is perfectly usable from C#. In fact, I would be very surprised if there aren't vastly more uses of this API from C#, since it's a very old trick of the trade.

What GP is saying is that, given that it is already included in the standard class library, it's always the cheapest option wrt size of your shipping app. So it should arguably be the default choice for any .NET dev unless they either need better performance or some more exotic requirements wrt input format.

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neonsunset 803 days ago
What is it with .NET or C# submissions (but I suppose other languages are not immune either) that attracts this type of replies, which miss the point behind a particular piece of code, trivial or not?

Yes, there are existing implementations, many of which are incomparably better, one of which ships with default project SDK (even if it is effectively obsolete[0]). But surely offering a competitive implementation that intends to replace existing solutions wasn't the purpose of this?

Either way, I'm not the author of the code and have already spent enough (free) time in the last 8 months working on a string library which has performant parsing as one of the project goals[1].

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/tree/main/src/libraries/Mi...

[1] https://github.com/U8String/U8String

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