Use LinqPad for your Micro Benchmarks

I’m a big fan of LinqPad. Anytime I need to test a small code snippet, it is my 'goto' tool.

Today I was looking at the latest beta release where I noticed the following announcement:

LINQPad now lets you benchmark code with a single keypress! Simply select the code you want to benchmark, and press Ctrl+Shift+B. LINQPad uses the industrial-grade BenchmarkDotNet library as the underlying engine, while providing a customizable real-time graphical display of results. For a complete tutorial, press Ctrl+F1 and type benchmark.

Whow! That looks great! Let’s give this feature a try:

• Download and extra the LinqPad 7 Beta release.
• Run LinqPad.

• At the top change the Language to ‘C# Program’.

• Now paste the following code:

	void Main()
	{
	}
	Random random=new();
	RandomNumberGenerator rng=RandomNumberGenerator.Create();
	byte[] buffer=new byte[1000];
	void SystemRandom()=> random.NextBytes(buffer);
	void CryptoRandom()=> rng.GetBytes(buffer);

view raw Benchmark.linq hosted with ❤ by GitHub

• Select the 2 methods at the bottom and hit Ctrl+Shift+B.

• LinqPad will ask you to download BenchmarkDotNet. Click Yes to continue.

• After downloading the NuGet package and it’s dependencies, click ‘I Accept’ to accept the License conditions.

• Now LinqPad will start a benchmark run and visualize the results.