Fastest way to fill an array with a single value [duplicate]

Question

I would like to fill a 2D array with a single value that I have, however, I would like to do it the quickest way possible has the 2D array's length will be a total of 200k+ and over time there will be over 200 of these arrays. I have looked into Buffer.BlockCopy and Array.Copy, however, they both take in arrays as the source/destination, where the only array I have is the destination, with the source being a single value.

What is the fastest way to fill in an array with the source being a single value and not an array?

Answer 1

The fastest method I have found uses Array.Copy with the copy size doubling each time through the loop. The speed is basically the same whether you fill the array with a single value or an array of values.

In my test with 20,000,000 array items, this function is twice as fast as a for loop.

using System;

namespace Extensions
{
    public static class ArrayExtensions
    {
        public static void Fill<T>(this T[] destinationArray, params T[] value)
        {
            if (destinationArray == null)
            {
                throw new ArgumentNullException("destinationArray");
            }

            if (value.Length >= destinationArray.Length)
            {
                throw new ArgumentException("Length of value array must be less than length of destination");
            }

            // set the initial array value
            Array.Copy(value, destinationArray, value.Length);

            int arrayToFillHalfLength = destinationArray.Length / 2;
            int copyLength;

            for(copyLength = value.Length; copyLength < arrayToFillHalfLength; copyLength <<= 1)
            {
                Array.Copy(destinationArray, 0, destinationArray, copyLength, copyLength);
            }

            Array.Copy(destinationArray, 0, destinationArray, copyLength, destinationArray.Length - copyLength);
        }
    }
}

I blogged about this at https://secureapplicationlifestyle.com/2011/11/initialize-array-to-value-in-c-very.html and https://secureapplicationlifestyle.com/2014/04/better-array-fill-function.html