I wanted to create a follow-up post in my series on IEnumerables, iterators, and collections focusing on performance characteristics. When checking out the runtime performance and memory characteristics between these materialized collections and iterator benchmarks, I was very surprised! Check out this article for performance benchmark characteristics and some curious finds.
This article is not set out to try and persuade you, the reader, that either using an iterator or materialized collection will universally solve your problems. Both iterator and materialized collection usage can be used to solve the scenarios that we'll be looking at, but both will come with a different set of pros and cons that we can further explore. The purpose of this article is to highlight scenarios based on real world experiences where either an iterator or materialized collection was being misunderstood, misused, and ultimately leading to a pile of headaches. As you read this article, if you find yourself saying "Well, sure, but they should have..." you're probably right. The problem is fundamentally not the usage of an iterator or the materialized collection, but not understanding how to consume them effectively. So I hope that when…
If you're newer to C# or programming in general, you may have used an iterator and not even realized it. Iterators can be a performant and effective tool that we have access to as .NET developers that allow us to traverse collections of data. Because one of the requirements of an iterator is that it must implement the IEnumerable interface, the results of an iterator can only be enumerated over. For example, you could use the results of an iterator in a foreach loop but you could not directly index into the iterator results (like you could an array) without some additional steps. Another requirement of iterators is that they use a special keyword called "yield" so that they can yield and return the individual elements that are to be provided to the caller of the iterator. In a nutshell,…
New to C# and looking to understand more about the IEnumerable interface? Check out this article for a crash course on getting started with C# IEnumerable!
