Next steps

Performance – that was what this chapter was all about. We learned why it is crucial, especially for system programming, to write software that is as fast and efficient as possible.

First, we looked at the BCL and the CLR and saw how the different data types can affect performance, but also that things don’t always behave as expected.

Then, we examined the types in the CTS and identified which types give us the best-performing systems and what to avoid. We spent quite some time in the Strings class. We also learned how to rewrite our code so that it uses the best tools this class gives us to make it behave faster.

After, we dove into the dark underworld of unsafe types and saw that they could give us even more performance but with the downside of the possibility of crashing our application, or even our system, in the most spectacular way.

Finally, we looked at ways to help the compiler make our systems even faster. Here, we learned that the compiler...