I have a program that parses data from both delimited files and Excel spreadsheets. I was trying out Span to speed up parsing the delimited files, but the ref struct restrictions mean I can't just hide the two different file formats behind an interface (without the small added overhead of repeatedly pulling Spans from Memory).
But what if I just wrote the ASCII strings from the Excel spreadsheets into a byte buffer, so that the same Span based parser could be used with both file formats? Seems like the overhead cost could be fairly low, and the Excel parsing is already intrinsically slower because of the decompression & XML parsing costs, so I'd be willing to take a small performance hit there for a big gain on the delimited files.
BenchmarkDotNet=v0.10.14, OS=Windows 10.0.17134
Intel Core i7-6600U CPU 2.60GHz (Skylake), 1 CPU, 4 logical and 2 physical cores
.NET Core SDK=2.1.301
[Host] : .NET Core 2.1.1 (CoreCLR 4.6.26606.02, CoreFX 4.6.26606.05), 64bit RyuJIT