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What is the "fast memory allocator" for "local strings"?

Discussion in '2020.2 Beta' started by sbeeman_hbs, Sep 21, 2020.

  1. sbeeman_hbs

    sbeeman_hbs

    Joined:
    Dec 5, 2019
    Posts:
    1
    The "new performance improvements in 2020.2" blog post says this:
    The team replaced lots of slow string memory allocations with temp memory labels, for strings that only exist within a single frame. In practice, most strings in Unity exist only as local variables within a single function call, so they can use a fast memory allocator. Most string utility functions now use temp memory.​

    Working more efficiently with strings is highly relevant to my interests. Can you elaborate on what you're doing? Is this on the native C side, or is this happening in CLR code? If the latter, is this just using stackalloc in unsafe code, or some other mechanism?
     
  2. richardkettlewell

    richardkettlewell

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Sep 9, 2015
    Posts:
    2,281
    The fast allocator is mainly only usable on the native side for strings, but we do expose some of the same features in script for some non-string types.

    For example, the fast memory allocator is very similar to what is used if you create a NativeArray with the Allocator.Temp parameter.
     
    Peter77 and LeonhardP like this.