Why is function isprefix faster than Startswith in C#?

Question

Does anyone know why C# (.NET)\'s StartsWith function is considerably slower than IsPrefix?

Answer 1

Check out the source of IsPrefix. The thing is - in some cases, it's going to be slower than StartsWith just because it actually uses StartsWith and does few more operations.

    [System.Security.SecuritySafeCritical]  // auto-generated
    public unsafe virtual bool IsPrefix(String source, String prefix, CompareOptions options)
    { 
        if (source == null || prefix == null) {
            throw new ArgumentNullException((source == null ? "source" : "prefix"), 
                Environment.GetResourceString("ArgumentNull_String")); 
        }
        Contract.EndContractBlock(); 
        int prefixLen = prefix.Length;

        if (prefixLen == 0)
        { 
            return (true);
        } 

        if (options == CompareOptions.OrdinalIgnoreCase)
        { 
            return source.StartsWith(prefix, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase);
        }

        if (options == CompareOptions.Ordinal) 
        {
            return source.StartsWith(prefix, StringComparison.Ordinal); 
        } 

        if ((options & ValidIndexMaskOffFlags) != 0) { 
            throw new ArgumentException(Environment.GetResourceString("Argument_InvalidFlag"), "options");
        }


        // to let the sorting DLL do the call optimization in case of Ascii strings, we check if the strings are in Ascii and then send the flag RESERVED_FIND_ASCII_STRING  to
        // the sorting DLL API SortFindString so sorting DLL don't have to check if the string is Ascii with every call to SortFindString. 

        return (InternalFindNLSStringEx(
                    m_dataHandle, m_handleOrigin, m_sortName, 
                    GetNativeCompareFlags(options) | Win32Native.FIND_STARTSWITH | ((source.IsAscii() && prefix.IsAscii()) ? RESERVED_FIND_ASCII_STRING : 0),
                    source, source.Length, 0, prefix, prefix.Length) > -1);
    }