OLolvy0·Oct 30, 2023
ZString is a similar project:
https://github.com/Cysharp/ZString
In FixedString – C# Zero allocation valuetype based fixed string implementationCysharp
ZString
C#2022–2023
Cysharp / ZString
ZString
Zero Allocation StringBuilder for .NET and Unity.
2Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Zero Allocation StringBuilder for .NET and Unity.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2022-06-19 12:48:55 UTC to 2023-10-30 04:42:10 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 2022 | 2022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Jul 2022 | 2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2022 | 2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2022 | 2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2022 | 2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2022 | 2022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2022 | 2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Feb 2023 | 2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2023 | 2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2023 | 2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2023 | 2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2023 | 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2023 | 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2023 | 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2023 | 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2023 | 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesAlso for hard real time systems (which do not necessarily include operating systems). You need to have a deterministic computation time each cycle and never go over the time budget allocated. With a GC that isn't reference-counted it's nondeterministic. It could also be nondeterministic with reference counting if run e.g. into a loop that allocates a lot of objects and then they are freed, but you can measure and control and fix this behavior more easily than when trying to work against a non-resource-counting GC.
Like others said here, it could certainly be done in C#, but you have to fight the language on some level. Events/delegates, strings and almost all collection classes are heap based and therefore can trigger the GC. It's difficult to do useful stuff without them.
But you can do what you'd do in typical hard real-time applica
Read the rest
tions anyway anyway, that is, preallocate everything you think you'll need. The APIs are there.
The most problematic data type is the string, it's almost impossible to do anything in C# without it, and it's in the heap, therefore can trigger the GC. Also it's immutable, so almost all useful operations on it produce another string(s). See Joe Duffy's old blog post here [0].
However Using the new Span<char> or ReadOnlySpan<char> which are stack based can alleviate that. Almost all string actions can be done on them. There's also a library called ZString which can be useful [1].
Another problem is the jit, which in "regular" dotnet works lazily, only on the first call to a function or even to string literals, so again you don't get deterministic execution. It is very quick but calling a new function chain in succession can add up. However using an AOT compilation like bflat does eliminates that problem.
Even without using AOT, you can approximate it by using reflection and calling RuntimeHelpers.PrepareMethod() on all methods in all referenced assemblies (except the system ones which should already be precompiled).
[0] https://github.com/joeduffy/joeduffy.github.io/blob/master/_...
[1] https://github.com/Cysharp/ZString
Zero Allocation StringBuilder for .NET Core and Unity
2 points · Open discussion