Sharpify 2.4.0-alpha

CHANGELOG

v2.4.0 - Alpha

• All derived types of PersistentDictionary now implement IDisposable interface.
• Main concurrent processing method is now ICollection<T>.ForAllAsync() from many, many benchmarks it became clear that for short duration tasks not involving heavy compute, it has by far the best compromise of speed and memory-allocation. If you use it with a non async function all the tasks will yield immediately and require virtually no allocations at all. Which is as good as ValueTask from benchmarks. This method has 2 overloads, one which accepts an IAsyncAction which enables users with long code and many captured variables to maintain a better structured codebase, and a Func alternative for quick and easy usage. The difference in memory allocation / execution time between time is nearly non-existent, this mainly for maintainability.
• For heavier compute tasks, please revert to using Parallel.For or Parallel.ForEachAsync and their overloads, they are excellent in load balancing.
• Due to the changes above, all other concurrent processing methods, such as ForEachAsync, InvokeAsync and all the related functionality from the Concurrent class have been removed. AsAsyncLocal entry is also removed, and users will be able to access the new ForAllAsync method directly from the ICollection<T> interface static extensions.
• Changes to TimeSpan related functions:
  • Format, FormatNonAllocated, ToRemainingDuration, ToRemainingDurationNonAllocated, ToTimeStamp, ToTimeStampNonAllocated, were all removed due to duplication and suboptimal implementations.
  • The new methods replacing these functionalities are now in Utils.DateAndTime namespace.
  • FormatTimeSpan is now replacing Format and FormatNonAllocated, FormatTimeSpan is hyper optimized. The first overload requires a Span{char} buffer of at least 30 characters, and returns a ReadOnlySpan{char} of the written portion. The second doesn't require a buffer, and allocated a new string which is returned. FormatTimeSpan outputs a different format than the predecessor, as the time was formatted in decimal and is rather confusing, now it is formatted as 00:00unit for the largest 2 units. So a minute and a half would be 01:30m and a day and a half would be 02:30d etc... this seems more intuitive to me.
  • FormatTimeStamp is now replacing ToTimeStamp and ToTimeStampNonAllocated, it is also optimized and the overloads work the same way as FormatTimeSpan.
• The StringBuffer which previously rented arrays from the shared array pool, then used the same API's to write to it as AllocatedStringBuffer was removed. The previous AllocatedStringBuffer was now renamed to StringBuffer and it requires a pre-allocated Span{char}. You can get the same functionality by renting any buffer, and simply supplying to StringBuffer.Create. This allowed removal of a lot of duplicated code and made the API more consistent. StringBuffer now doesn't have an implicit converter to ReadOnlySpan{char} anymore, use StringBuffer.WrittenSpan instead.
• IModifier{T} was removed, use Func<T, T> instead.
• Utils.Strings.FormatBytes was changed in the same manner as Utils.DateAndTime.FormatTimeSpan and Utils.DateAndTime.FormatTimeStamp, it now returns a ReadOnlySpan<char> instead of a string and it is optimized to use less memory.
• ThreadSafe<T> now implements IEquatable<T> and IEquatable<ThreadSafe<T>> to allow comparisons.

This alpha version has an almost complete feature set as the stable version which will be released with support and optimizations from .NET 9, this one is supported fully on .NET 8, for the large part, this release is complete except for minor tweaks that would be made possible by .NET 9.