Would it make sense to support Span<byte>?

[kmgallahan]

Hi. As the title indicates, would it make sense to support creation of MagickImage objects by passing in a Span<byte> to avoid allocating new byte[]'s / streams?

I'm not familiar with the Magick.NET internals, so I'm not sure how much of a pure wrapper it is.

[dlemstra]

It could be possible to add support for span but that would require me to either go from netstandard20 to netstandard21 or to add a dependency to be able to use Span<T> with netstandard20. The latter sounds like a bad plan to me. But I am not sure if I want to switch to 2.1 at this point in time. This would break support for .NET Core 2.1.

And a third option would be also adding support for netstandard21 besides supporting netstandard20 but I really don't want to add another target platform.

[kmgallahan]

Would a constructor taking an IntPtr + length be too messy? Again, not sure if Magick.NET ever touches the data before passing it to native code. I'm just curious because I'm currently consuming an unmanaged image buffer and so copying it to a byte array just to have it turned back into a pointer seems wasteful.

[dlemstra]

I published a new release a week ago that adds new Span<T> overloads in various locations.

[kmgallahan]

Excellent, I'll take advantage of this asap.