[int_19h]

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.

[neonsunset]

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