C#/CLR does not have built in way to initalize array with non-default values.
Your code is as efficient as it could get if you measure in operations per item.
You can get potentially faster initialization if you initialize chunks of huge array in parallel. This approach will need careful tuning due to non-trivial cost of mutlithread operations.
Much better results can be obtained by analizing your needs and potentially removing whole initialization alltogether. I.e. if array is normally contains constant value you can implement some sort of COW (copy on write) approach where your object initially have no backing array and simpy returns constant value, that on write to an element it would create (potentially partial) backing array for modified segment.
Slower but more compact code (that potentially easier to read) would be to use Enumerable.Repeat. Note that ToArray
will cause significant amount of memory to be allocated for large arrays (which may also endup with allocations on LOH) - High memory consumption with Enumerable.Range?.
var result = Enumerable.Repeat(value, size).ToArray();