A Complete .NET Developer's Guide to Span with Stephen Toub

Scott and Stephen are back with another entry in the Deep .NET series, this time looking deep at System.Span enabling the representation of contiguous regions of arbitrary memory, regardless of whether that memory is associated with a managed object, is provided by native code via interop, or is on the stack. And it does so while still providing safe access with performance characteristics like that of arrays. Let's go deep on Span.
Chapters:
00:00:00 Exploring the Impact and Evolution of Span in Software Engineering
00:03:09 Deep Dive into Assembly Code and its Translation
00:04:15 Exploring Methods to Disassemble and Analyze C# Function
00:05:43 Exploring the JIT Compiler and Assembly Code Optimization
00:12:03 Understanding Arrays and Pointers in Programming
00:16:46 Understanding Memory Management and Array Access in Programming
00:24:35 Discussing the Cost and Implementation of Memory Management Functions
00:26:23 Exploring the Intersection of Performance, Maintenance, and Interop in Programming
00:31:51 Understanding the Concept and Impact of Span in Computer Science
00:39:28 Discussion on Memory Protection and Immutability in Unix and Windows
00:45:59 Implementing and Understanding the Concept of Ref Functions in C#
00:51:08 Exploring JavaScript Optimal Notation and Memory Management
00:54:28 Exploring the Implementation and Functionality of Span in Programming
00:59:53 The Evolution and Impact of Span in .NET Development
Resources:
Documentation: learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/st...
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#dotnet

[@barrysphone]

This series is awesome, please keep it going for a long time. Stephen's knowledge is incredible and his enthusiasm is infectious. The dynamic between Scott and Stephen make this series unmissable.

[@1camper69]

These talks from Stephen are truly the best dotnet content available. Stephen has the knowledge and goes next level in explaining it extremely clear but simple and is just a joy to listen to.

[@marklord7614]

Man, these guys are killing it with the series -- great topics.

[@BloodHaZaRd666]

Like video at 0 seconds just because of @Stephen Toub

[@akeemaweda1716]

Not you alone. I did exact same thing, because it's the wizards show!

[@asedtf]

Like this comment at 1 second because I had to stop to like the video first because of Stephen Toub

[@thomastaylor648]

We need more Stephen Toub's

[@lordtony8276]

"Have you got anything without Span?" "Well, there's Span Span List and Span, that's not got much Span in it."

[@MatteoGariglio]

This series of videos featuring Stephen Toub is truly remarkable and incredibly interesting. Thank you!

[@The.WorldVentures]

How does someone even become as great as Stephen Toub, man the guy knows his stuff.

[@jackkendall6420]

You do it as your fulltime job for multiple decades, haha.

[@kaolyfe-cw2cm]

Pray enough to the coding gods...j/k 😄

[@CuriouslyContent]

I can't get enough of this content :) Who would have thought that an hour long video on spans is literally the most exciting thing on my feed this week!

[@Tamazakis]

TimeSpan well spent! Thank you :)

[@FICHEKK]

Learning from Stephen Toub is such a pleasure, man is a .NET master!

[@draganradovac8803]

Scott and Stephen are a great combo. Looking forward to future presentations.

[@weirdwyrd2017]

That floppy drive jumper comparison got me. The assembly I could follow, ain't never heard of a jumper before. Today I learned a couple things! Great content!

[@ElSnakeObwb]

Love this series. keep it up

[@behboodik]

Every video with Stephen in it is a treasure

[@fieryscorpion]

This is amazing! Now I need a video on Multithreading and Parallel Processing from Scott and Stephen!

[@MichalMracka]

Dataflow...

[@lstutzman]

Fantastic content guys!! Can’t wait for the next one. A deep dive into the GC would be cool

[@TheChonsey]

Awesome content. Please make a video on System.IO.Pipelines

[@dlandi]

Scott and Stephen: Outstanding series!

[@amrswalha]

Scott and Stephen are doing a great job, all the best.

[@sanampakuwal]

WOW!!! Love these series, please don't stop!

[@MarkRendle]

It's crazy how simple Span is on the inside considering the impact it's had on .NET in recent years.

[@BryanKelly]

How does Span relate to Memory? I'd love to see a follow up to this that gets into that detail.

[@delphiguy23]

I saw Stephen Toub, I clicked.... freaking awesome presentation learned a lot from this.

[@JavedaliShaikh-yy1jr]

Just Brilliant! Keep making more of these.. Thanks.

[@superpcstation]

Please don't stop making these!

[@wimzi9887]

I wanna watch Stephen build a complex project from start to finish. I would love to see how he works.

[@ChaoticNeutral6]

That was wild, I definitely want to see a part 2. Would also be cool to go through stuff like MemoryMarshall and its methods

[@sgwong513]

its the only video I need to watch to learn what is Span in .net

[@freierNamen]

Oh no, it happened again! The video is over and I've already seen all parts of the series😢😂 Thank you so much! Love every second of it...

[@tayyabshaikh3286]

Pure Knowledge Sharing.. & No dumb podcast like others.. Truly Marvelous. ♥

[@SajadJalilian]

Dotnet has many layers of abstractions in a good way. They are like magic. Watching this series is like those videos in which a magician explains how they are doing their tricks under the hood. I love it.

[@fatlumlatifi2897]

Excellent video, please keep Mr. Toub on a few more episodes. As of topics to cover if possible please make video on how to interop or preferably make binding of C libraries on .NET.

[@mey33am]

Keep posting Stephan! We need more content like this, Thank You

[@alexisfibonacci]

I haven't seen Bart De Smet in years. Is he available to talk about IObservable? Why has there been less emphasis on it in recent times? Also IQbservable..

[@levimatheri7682]

Stephen Toub is my spirit animal. So smart!

[@colhountech]

Best Content On youtube today. I love the relaxed page and the high intensity content. It's almost an anti pattern of all the click-bate, gapless, b-roll crap on youtube today. If stephen does a workshop of stuff like this in NDC London next year, I'll drop $2000 to attend like when Dave and Damiean did the early workshops on .net core in circa 2017.

[@dy0mber847]

Incredible as always

[@LasseVagstherKarlsen]

Man, you guys nailed it as usual, absolutely love these videos. GC next? 🙂

[@user-yf8fi7lc5s]

Like in the good old days of Channel 9 👍

[@imranhussain8700]

Async/Await LINQ RegEx Span 😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀 Loving it. Thank you very much. Great Content.

[@SimoLPers]

The series is really great! Thanks for sharing! ME me I'd personally love to see how what lies under the hood of reflection.

[@DavidPereira-lc1yq]

This is freaking awesome!!! Right from the source, you should build a comprehensive "deep C# course" with all of this, for people that would like to purse perf related topics. Right now, I don't think there's a place where you can do that. It's basically spread around books, courses, blogs, etc etc. Really nice this one.

[@MehrdadSoltani-qn2ny]

one of the best demo/tutorials I have ever seen about Span.

[@djchrisi]

28:30 unsafe ist really a great keyword because it truly scares developers off ;)

[@norm6096]

You guys are awesome combo, thanks for the videos! :)

[@SlackwareNVM]

I'm interested in the meaning behind that last constructor check. Also, what are the tradeoffs from the alternative implementations you mentioned? Would love to know more about Memory as well. I don't yet have proper intuition of how to use it.

[@rodrigolima206]

Very nice explanation thanks a lot. I would like to see something related to streams and how they work I was always curious about that. If possible, of course. Thanks again .

[@timur2887]

Thank you very much! Great content!

[@AndrzejPauli]

StephenT and ScottH - nothing is better 🙂

[@GuildOfCalamity]

Keep doing these with Stephen; would like to see more roll-your-own content, like the Async/Task video.

[@WizardofWestmarch]

At 38:48 Toub is talking about how if you have a readonly span it will put it in the data block of the binary. Do things like ImmutableArray get the same benefit or is the JIT compiler extra aware of ReadOnlySpan to do that optimization?

[@fedayka]

The worst thing about this show is its time constraint! Great content guys! Amazing :)

[@tirgo007]

Great stuff! Looking forward to the next one.

[@hashdynamics978]

my new favorite tv show. Love it!

[@AskFiqri]

This is a treat

[@preet1979]

This was a great video. All I need now is another deep dive video into Memory to complete my understanding of it. Thanks again for such a great video.

[@enijburg]

Another great session! Keep them coming 🎉

[@uitumenj8380]

I’m value added :))) thank you guys!

[@JakobStrasser]

Thanks, very informative!

[@schlott1970]

My biggest question was how, using span, was the compiler able to keep such a tight loop when enumerating? Also could have mentioned that span does not allocate any memory or copy stuff around! This was a good one Scott/stephen! Thankyou

[@davidantolingonzalez4929]

It does allocate memory for the Span (two fields), but it does on the stack, not on the heap. Also, since it only stores an address of memory and an int, no copy of data is needed. The tight loop is achieved because T reference is basically a pointer so for enumerating the only thing it has to do is add "one" to the pointer times length, exactly the same as an array.

[@dlandi]

Riffing off "Naming is hard": Spam Hmmm.

[@mrqbboy]

I'm going to repeat myself, but thanks Scott and Stephen.

[@davidmasterson883]

I just love these videos!

[@ivandrofly]

34:31 - Pause 39:00 - utf8 syntax from c# 11

[@nessitro]

I love this! Tanmirt!

[@SahilDesai-sx3sn]

knowledge SPANNING multiple videos.

[@dy0mber847]

Show must go on

[@StackOverflowMan]

"readonly ref struct" appears in C# 8, while Span appreared earlier in .net core 2, and than Span was just a struct. Would be interesting to see how it evolve.

[@lolroflxd]

Awesome ❤

[@YuriBez2023]

@37:11 - Stephen's fingers were off-by-one there.

[@Corvinaification]

Amazing!

[@yonatan2608]

These kind of videos should be in 202 schools.

[@anm3037]

Any interface for all collections (Array, List, etc) that can be converted to Span

[@jackkendall6420]

rubbed my hands together and cackled when I saw this

[@Aaron31056]

Amazing

[@yonatan2608]

thank youuuu

[@paulscarlett4346]

"Please - May I have more?"

[@jr.BoarOfGold]

I leave my instant like

[@imranhussain8700]

Tell us in the comment what you like and what you don't like. There are five videos now and I am still figuring out what are don't like. is there anything in these videos that we don't like, I don't think so.

[@user-od4ce8pe3u]

Idea for next video: exception under the hood

[@ivandrofly]

At the beginning of the video, while using Rider and I'm like it's still hard to see the IL code in Visual Studio 😆😆

[@robl39]

Can you guys please deep dive the csc or the CLR?

[@isaacayodejii]

too gooood!

[@kishananem]

Hello Scott/ Stephen Please do videos about algorithms used in framework. Please like comments who interested in this. They may do video.

[@Cymricus]

the people in chat being negative about copilot are gonna get behind if they don’t use the very powerful tools at our disposal. you really don’t want to be behind in a world with generative AI.

[@davidelizalde3844]

Nice Invensible t-shirt

[@dsellers]

👏

[@MladenMihajlovic]

You should really put "deep dive" in all the titles - much easier to find.

[@shanselman]

fair...there's a playlist also

[@MladenMihajlovic]

@@shanselman Oh cool didn't know that. Favoritttettteeteed ;-) Playlists don't seem to come up when searching youtube sadly.

[@__angle]

🥰

[@dskim2459]

why dooes audio quality from .net never improve? please give them a good mic

[@richmenaft]

Please, do this series in dark mode...

[@skarcade]

How many times was he told to zoom in during this video? 🔍😂

[@zumalifeguard3493]

It's kinda freaking me out honestly that Scott doesn't know arrays in C# are always contiguous. I know he's a very good developer. Just surprised I guess. Arrays have to be contiguous or couldn't effectively rely on locality of references. That's the big reason why std::vector is now recommended as the primary algorithm in C++, instead of things like linked-lists, etc., because in modern architecture, it's actually faster to work with contiguous arrays for a lot of things that previously used to be not be option -- all because of modern hardware.

[@yufgyug3735]

damn my only wish is to be as smart as these guys are

[@tedchirvasiu]

C##

[@Grimlock1979]

Funny how he doesn't start talking about spans until half way through the video.

[@LasseVagstherKarlsen]

Weeeeeeeeeee!

[@h.jpouya4715]

great video. but is it possible to use dark mode for next episodes? like sharplab @4:32

[@Kitulous]

where's the dude that said that span was basically a reference to someone or whatever they said? look, an entire hour about spans!

[@aguilaaudax1362]

First time Microsoft is really teaching something