I believe that in .NET 2.0 (due for release q3 2017*) the Span<T> will allow efficient access to parts of an array of bytes.

We have a scenario where we read files of 100MB that are made up of a repeating pattern of meta data followed by LZ4 MessagePack Serialized content.
When reading the files, we currently copy the content to its own array and pass that to LZ4MessagePackSerializer.Deserialize.
I believe we would reduce our GC pressure considerably if we were able to use the Span<T> type.
Alternatively offset and length parameters could be added to the Deserialize method.
A further alternative is that and overload of Deserialize takes ArraySegment<T> as its argument.

This appears to be considered as a feature (#60), but I thought I would raise an issue so that it can be tracked.

Also thanks for the library. We have seen some massive speed improvements adopting it.

Supporting links

• https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/roadmap.md
• https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/5851
• https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/src/mscorlib/shared/System/Span.cs
• Location when issue raised - https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/bfc3141f97a9f9f0d095f3d2e99a7c02ce869ab0/src/mscorlib/shared/System/Span.cs