Overthinking CSV With Cesil: C# 8 Specifics

Posted: 2020/06/30 | Author: | Filed under: code | Tags: | Comments Off on Overthinking CSV With Cesil: C# 8 Specifics

Way back in the first post of this series I mentioned that part of the motivation for Cesil was to get familiar with new C# 8 features, and to use modern patterns. This post will cover how, and why, Cesil has adopted these features.

The feature with the biggest impact is probably IAsyncEnumerable<T>, and it’s associated await foreach syntax. This shows up in Cesil’s public interface, as the returned value of IAsyncReader<TRow>.EnumerateAllAsync(), a parameter of IAsyncWriter<TRow>.WriteAllAsync(…), and as a returned value or parameter on various CesilUtils methods. IAsyncEnumerable<T> enables a nice way to yield elements that are obtained asynchronously, a perfect match for serialization libraries that consume streams. Pre-C# 8 you could kind of accomplish this with an IEnumerable<Task<T>>, but that’s both more cumbersome for clients to consume and slightly weird since MoveNext() shouldn’t block so you’d have to smuggle if the stream is complete into the yielded T. IAsyncEnumerable<T> is also disposed asynchronously, using another new-to-C#-8 feature…

IAsyncDisposable, which is the async equivalent to IDisposable, also sees substantial used in Cesil – although mostly internally. It is implemented on IAsyncReader<TRow> and IAsyncWriter<TRow> and, importantly, IDisposable is not implemented. Using IAsyncDisposable lets you require that disposal happen asynchronously, which Cesil uses to require that all operations on an XXXAsync interface are themselves async. C# 8 also introduces the await using syntax, which makes consuming IAsyncDisposables as simple for clients as consuming IDisposables. Pre-C# 8 if a library wanted to allow clients to write idiomatic code with usings it would have to support synchronous disposal on interfaces with asynchronous operations, essentially mandating sync-over-async and all the problems that it introduces.

The rest of the features introduced in C# 8 mostly see use internally, resulting in a code base that’s a little easier to work on but not having much impact on consumers. From roughly most to least impact-ful, the features adopted in Cesil’s code are:

  • Static local functions
    • These were extensively used to implement the “actually go async”-parts of reading and writing, while keeping the fast path await-free.
    • The big benefit is having the compiler enforce that local functions aren’t closing over any variables not explicitly passed into them, which means you can be confident invoking the function involves no implicit allocations.
  • Switch expressions
    • These were mostly adopted in a tail position, where previously I’d have a switch where each case returned some calculated value.
    • Using switching expressions instead of switch statements results in more compact code, which is a welcome quality-of-life improvement.
  • Default interface methods
    • These let you attach a method with an implementation to an interface. The primary use case is to allow libraries to make additions to an already published interface without that breaking consumers.
    • There’s another use case though, the one Cesil adopts, which is to attach an implemented method that all implementers of an interface will need. An example of this is ITestableDisposable, where the AssertNotDisposed method is the same everywhere but IsDisposed logic needs to be implemented on each implementing type.
    • In older versions of C#, I’d use an extension method or some other static method to share this implementation but default interface methods let me keep the declarations and implementations closer together. Just another small quality-of-life improvement, but there’s potential for this to be a much bigger help in post-1.0 releases of Cesil.
  • Indices and Ranges
    • These simplify taking elements or slices of strings, Spans, and so on. Cesil also supported reading and writing the new Index and Range types.
    • Another small quality-of-life improvement, though I have seen this one catch some bugs when changing foo[something.Length – 1] to foo[^1].
  • Readonly Members
    • You use these when you can’t make an entire struct readonly, but want the compiler to guarantee certain members don’t mutate the struct.
    • I only did this in a few places, there aren’t that many mutable structs in Cesil, but having the compiler guarantee invariants is always a useful safety net.

Readers who closely follow C# are probably thinking “wait, what about nullable reference types?”. Those were the big new feature in C# 8, and Cesil has adopted them. However, unlike the other new C# 8 features, I intentionally deferred adopting them until Cesil was fairly mature as I wanted to explore converting an existing code base. My next post will go into that process in detail.

There aren’t really any Open Questions around the C# 8 features in this post. There were so many in the previous post on flexibility, that I think it’s probably best to just go and leave your thoughts on them instead.

As a reminder, they were…

  1. Are there any missing Format-specific options Cesil should have?
  2. Is the amount of control given over Cesil’s allocations sufficient?
  3. Are there any interesting .NET types that Cesil’s type mapping scheme doesn’t support?

Overthinking CSV With Cesil: “Maximum” Flexibility

Posted: 2020/06/24 | Author: | Filed under: code | Tags: | 1 Comment

Over the course of this series I’ve alluded to a future post where I’ll dig into all the configuration options Cesil offers.

This is that, gigantic, post.

I conceptualize Cesil’s configurability as being along three axes: the format, memory use, and type mapping. Format options control the style of delimiter separated value (DSV) you’re reading or writing, memory options give fine grained control over allocations, and type mappings handle converting from .NET types to text and vice versa.

To begin, let’s start with…

Format Options

The necessity of being able to configure different format options is clear for any CSV library, since as I said in an earlier post CSV isn’t really a format – it’s a bunch of related formats. For a library like Cesil, which aims to support all reasonable DSV formats, the necessity is even more obvious.

All configuration options relevant to formatting live on the Options type, with corresponding WithXXX methods on OptionsBuilder. These options are:

  • ValueSeparator – the single character used to separate columns in a row
  • RowEnding – whether rows end in the \n, \r, or \r\n character sequence
    • Most CSV files us \r\n, but Cesil can automatically detect this when reading if you use RowEnding.Detect
    • When using Detect, Cesil will use the character sequence it first encounters as the expected row ending
    • When writing, a RowEnding other than Detect must be provided or an exception will be raised when an IWriter<TRow> or IAsyncWriter<TRow> is created
  • EscapedValueStartAndEnd – the character used to start and end an escaped value
    • Typically this is a double quote, but it can be left unset
    • If your format treats , as a value separator and would store Montrose, Kevin as “Montrose, Kevin” then you’re using a double quote for this
  • EscapedValueEscapeCharacter – the character used to start an escape sequence when you are already in an escaped value
    • Typically this is a double quote, but it can be left unset
    • If your format would store Kevin “Monty” Montrose as “Kevin “”Monty”” Montrose” then you’re using a double quote for this
  • ReadHeader – whether to always expect a header row, never expect a header row, or automatically detect a header row
    • This tends to vary file to file, so it is often set to ReadHeader.Detect
    • If you use Always or Detect, Cesil will use the header to infer column order when mapping columns to .NET types
    • If your format supports comments, it is legal for comments to precede a header row
  • CommentCharacter – the single character that starts a comment line
    • Typically this is not set, but if set it is often #
    • For example a single line of #hello world would be a comment of hello world, in formats with # for this
  • WhitespaceTreatment – whether to trim whitespace that is encountered in certain places while parsing
    • Most formats preserve whitespace if it is encountered in a value, and do not permit whitespace as padding around escaped values
    • If your format is one that is unusual, Cesil supports automatically trimming whitespace in certain cases. Refer to WhitespaceTreatments for the full list of trimming behaviors
    • Note that WhitespaceTreatments is a [Flags] enum, and so all different combinations of behavior can be combined.
  • ExtraColumnTreatment – how to handle encountering “extra” columns when reading
    • Cesil considers a column “extra” if it doesn’t map to a member, or if it’s in a column that didn’t appear in the header row (if there is a header row)
    • If you’re reading into dynamics and not requiring a header row, extra columns will be any that have an index greater than the highest index in the first read row
    • This must be one of:
  • WriteHeader – whether or not to write a header row before writing any values
  • WriteTrailingRowEnding – whether or not to end the final written row with the configured RowEnding

And that’s it. Ten options which, hopefully, allow Cesil to cope with all reasonable DSV formats out there. I’d be quite interested to learn of any that Cesil can’t cope with – it’s always a fun challenge to make a system more flexible without sacrificing ease of use or performance.

Now we’ll move on to…

Allocation Options

Beyond “don’t allocate more than necessary” it may strike some as odd to care about memory allocation in a .NET library – after all, .NET is a managed (ie. garbage collected) platform. I believe that in fact a modern .NET library should strive to both minimize allocations and provide ways for clients to control those allocations that must happen. The .NET ecosystem has been evolving in a much more performance focused direction for a while now, with fancy new types like Span and Pipelines encouraging low allocation and low copy patterns, first class support for processor intrinsics, and struct alternatives (that don’t default to allocating on the heap) like ValueTuple and ValueTask. The .NET GC is good, but it’s never going to be free so a laser focus on allocations is common when concerned with performance. It follows that if a library’s clients are focused on controlling allocations, a library needs to give them the tools they need to control allocations.

That said, some heap allocations are unavoidable. Cesil does its best to perform all unavoidable allocations prior to returning an I(Async)Reader<TRow> or I(Async)Writer<TRow> – so creating Options, binding IBoundConfigurations<TRow>, and the actual creation of a reader or writer may allocate but after that, allocations are under client control. There are exceptions, but I’ll dig into those in a later section.

On Options, there are a few relevant members:

  • MemoryPool – when Cesil needs to allocate, the MemoryPool<char> it uses to obtain a block of memory
    • Cesil will always request a size it can work with, but if a client does not return a chunk of memory at least the requested size an exception may be raised
    • Cesil will always call IMemoryOwner<char>.Dispose() when finished using a chunk of memory
    • MemoryPools must be thread safe, as Cesil makes no guarantees that IMemoryOwner<char> references remain on any given thread
  • ReadBufferSizeHint – when reading, Cesil needs a buffer to store characters it has not yet processed. This value specifies how large that buffer should be
    • There is often a tradeoff between buffer size and performance, the larger the buffer the fewer calls to an underlying stream are needed to load all data, and thus reading will complete more quickly. This is not true once a buffer is large enough that the underlying stream cannot fill it on each call, or if the underlying stream is frequently blocked waiting for more data
    • Setting ReadBufferSizeHint to 0 tells Cesil to request a “reasonable default” buffer size
    • The read buffer is obtain from the configured MemoryPool<char>, allowing clients to control precisely how the buffer is allocated
  • WriteBufferSizeHint – when writing, Cesil can stage writes into a buffer to improve performance. This value specifies if a buffer should be used, and how large it should be
    • As with ReadBufferSizeHint there is often a trade-off between buffer size and performance. If there is no buffer, every write must call into the underlying stream which can make writing take considerably longer.
    • Setting WriteBufferSizeHint to 0 disables write buffering, all data will be sent directly to the underlying stream
    • Setting WriteBufferSizeHint to null tells Cesil to request a “reasonable default” buffer size
    • The write buffer is obtain from the configured MemoryPool<char>, allowing clients to control precisely how the buffer is allocated
  • DynamicRowDisposal – controls when dynamic rows obtained during reading are disposed

Moving beyond Options, IReader<TRow> and IAsyncReader<TRow> have the XXXWithReuse() methods – these methods take a ref parameter that points to a row to reuse when reading. When processing many rows in sequence, these methods let you allocate a single row and then just repeatedly reuse it – greatly reducing the number of allocations. There are a few caveats to keep in mind. First, if a row has a Setter backed by constructor parameters (more on those below) a row cannot be reused and will always be reallocated. Second, value types are always zero initialized so there is always a row to reuse if the row is a value type – this means your InstanceProvider (more on those below) may not be invoked when you’d expect it to be, if the row was a reference type. Finally, because the XXXWithReuse() methods return the ref parameter will be initialized with the row that will ultimately be initialized it is possible (especially in async cases, when the underlying stream blocks) for Cesil to allocate a row it ends up not needing.

The last piece of allocation control has lots of overlap with type mapping, which is covered in the next section, but in brief: InstanceProviders give clients control over how rows are obtained, and Parsers give control for how ReadOnlySpans<char> are turned into instances of other types. Other types that participate in type mapping allow for control over accessing members, assigning members, and so on – so a client can customize any step of the process that might concern them.

With allocations covered, let’s now proceed to the final axis of configuration…

Type Mapping

DSVs provide rows and columns of text, and that’s it really. .NET has a much richer type system, and so Cesil must provide some way to move between these two worlds. Complicating that is how many different styles of .NET coding are out there, a good library must provide clients with the tools they need to match Cesil’s behavior to their own applications.

Cesil breaks this process of mapping types to and from text into several logical pieces, many of which have been mentioned in earlier posts:

Each of these types has particular rules about what kind of method, delegate, constructor, etc. can back them which are detailed in the documentation for each type, and on Cesil’s wiki.

Additionally, a number of these types (like Parser) have a notion of failure (indicated by returning false from a method or delegate) and support delegating to another instance as a fallback. This is used via their Else(…) method, which creates and returns a new instance what will delegate on failure.

As mentioned above, the ITypeDescriber interface requires a little more discussion. It has six methods, each of which supports a particular use case for Cesil:

In addition to the raw ITypeDescriber interface, Cesil also provides three implementations of the interface out of the box. They are:

And that wraps up my deep dive in Cesil’s flexibility. There’s even more detail in the wiki and on the reference documentation (linked throughout this post) for the involved types, but this post should at least give you a decent basic understanding.

Which brings us to the Open Questions of this post:

  1. Are there any missing Format-specific options Cesil should have?
  2. Is the amount of control given over Cesil’s allocations sufficient?
  3. Are there any interesting .NET types that Cesil’s type mapping scheme doesn’t support?

As before, I’ve opened three issues to gather long form responses.  Remember that, as part of the sustainable open source experiment I detailed in the first post of this series, any commentary from a Tier 2 GitHub Sponsor will be addressed in a future comment or post. Feedback from non-sponsors will receive equal consideration, but may not be directly addressed.

My next post will tackle a smaller subject – I’ll be going over some of the new features that came with C# 8, and the how and why of Cesil’s adoption of them.

Overthinking CSV With Cesil: Writing Dynamic Types

Posted: 2020/06/16 | Author: | Filed under: code | Tags: | Comments Off on Overthinking CSV With Cesil: Writing Dynamic Types

I covered how to write known, static, types with Cesil in my previous post. As with reading, Cesil also supports dynamic types.

In my post on dynamic reading, I argued dynamic is still worth supporting due to how convenient it makes some common read operations. I feel the case for writing dynamic types is much weaker – it is rare to want to write heterogeneous types, and even rarer to not be able to easily map such a mixed collection to a single known type. All that said, for symmetry’s sake Cesil does have extensive support for writing dynamic types.

As with reading, writing static and dynamic types is essentially symmetric. All the same methods are provided, supporting all the same operations. The only difference is rather than using Configuration.For<TRow>() you use Configuration.ForDynamic(), and rather than IBoundConfiguration<TRow> being parameterized by a type TRow it’s parameterized by dynamic.

When using the DefaultTypeDescriber, performance varies considerably based on the “kind” of dynamic you are writing. Cesil special cases “well known” dynamic types for improved performance – namely the dynamic rows Cesil creates and ExpandoObject are treated specially. For other DLR aware types Cesil will use IDynamicMetaObjectProvider directly, which is considerably slower. Plain .NET types delegate to the usual EnumerateMembersToSerialize method, which implements “normal” .NET behavior.

Cesil allows customizing the members discovered, and the order they’ll be written in, by using a custom ITypeDescriber with your Options and implementing the GetCellsForDynamicRow directly.  Simple inclusive/exclusive can be controlled by subclass the DefaultTypeDescriber and overriding the ShouldIncludeCell method. I’ll cover how this works in more detail in a later post that goes in depth into all of Cesil’s configuration options.

And that’s about it for dynamic serialization – there’s not a lot to cover since so much of it is “just like writing static types, but dynamic.”  This post’s Open Question is, accordingly, more “tactical” than previous ones:

The interface isn’t technical wrong, but it has the undesirable property that general implementations will allocate at least a little bit for each row written.  An allocation-free alternative would be a marked improvement, provided it doesn’t come at the cost of flexibility or reasonable performance.

As before, I’ve opened an issue to gather long form responses.  Remember that, as part of the sustainable open source experiment I detailed in the first post of this series, any commentary from a Tier 2 GitHub Sponsor will be addressed in a future comment or post. Feedback from non-sponsors will receive equal consideration, but may not be directly addressed.

In my next post I’ll go into detail on all the configuration options Cesil supports. It’ll be a long post, as Cesil supports customizing the expected format, as well as almost every detail of describing and mapping types.

Overthinking CSV With Cesil: Writing Known Types

Posted: 2020/06/12 | Author: | Filed under: code | Tags: | Comments Off on Overthinking CSV With Cesil: Writing Known Types

My last two posts have covered deserializing with Cesil, the subsequent two will cover serialization. This post will specifically dig into the case where you know the types involved at compile time, while the next one will cover the dynamic type case. If you’ve read the previous posts on read operations hopefully a lot of this will seem intuitive, just in reverse.

Again, CesilUtils exposes a bunch of utility methods – this time with names like WriteXXX. Variants exist for single row, multiple row, synchronous, asynchronous, and “straight to a file” operations. Just like with reading, CesilUtils doesn’t allow you to reuse an IBoundConfiguration<TRow> nor does it expose the underlying I(Async)Writer<TRow> but is convenient when performance and customization aren’t of paramount importance.

As with reading, maximum performance and flexibility is found in using either IWriter<TRow> or IAsyncWriter<TRow> interfaces obtained from an IBoundConfiguration<TRow> created via Configuration.For<TRow>. Creating configurations is mildly expensive, so caching and reusing them can be beneficial.

The writer interfaces expose methods to do the following:

  • Write a collection of rows with WriteAll(Async)
    • The sync version accepts an IEnumerable<T>
    • The async version can take either an IEnumerable<T> or an IAsyncEnumerable<T>
  • Write a single row with Write(Async)
  • Write a comment with WriteComment(Async)
    • If a comment contains a row ending sequence of characters, it will be split into multiple comments automatically

Mapping a type to a set of columns, the order of the those columns, and the conversion of the values of those columns to text is done with the ITypeDescriber registered on the Options provided to Configuration.For<TRow> or the method on CesilUtils (by default, this is an instance of DefaultTypeDescriber). When an IBoundConfiguration<TRow> is created ITypeDescriber.EnumerateMembersToSerialize is invoked once and the returned SerializableMembers detail how Cesil will map a TRow instance to a set of text columns.

Specifically a SerializableMember details

  • The name of column, which may be written as part of a header row
  • The Getter to use to obtain a value from a TRow instance
  • An (optional) ShouldSerialize to control, per-row, whether a column should be included
  • The Formatter used to turn the columns value into a sequence of characters
  • Whether or not to include a column if it has the default value for it’s type
    • Cesil uses Activator.CreateInstance to obtain a default instance of ValueTypes, and use null as the default value for reference types

The order of columns is taken from the order they are yielded by the IEnumerable<SerializableMember> returned by ITypeDescriber.EnumerateMembersToSerialize.

There is quite a lot of flexibility in how Getters, ShouldSerializes, and Formatters can be created. They will be covered in detail in a later post.

There’s less internal state being managed when Cesil is writing in comparison to when it is reading, so there are no fancy state machines or lookup tables. The most interesting part is NeedsEncodeHelper which is used to check for characters that would require escaping, which makes use of the X64 intrinsics supported in modern .NET (provided your processor supports them).

There are some minor additional details to keep in mind while writing with Cesil:

  • All XXXAsync() methods try to make as much progress as they can without blocking, they don’t just yield to yield.
  • All XXXAsync() methods do take an optional CancellationToken, and pass it down to the underlying stream. CancellationTokens are checked at reasonable intervals, but no guarantees are made about how often.
  • If you try to write a comment without having configured your Options with a comment character, an exception will be raised.
  • If you try and write a value that would require escaping without having configured your Options with a way to start and end escaped values, an exception will be raised.
    • Options.Default has ” as it’s escape start and stop characters.
  • If you try to write a value that includes the escape start and stop character, but have not configured your Options with an escape character, an exception will be raised.

And that about covers how to write static types with Cesil.

The Open Question for this post is a return to an earlier one, but with a particular focus on writing: Is there anything missing from IWriter(Async) that you’d expect to be supported in a modern .NET CSV library?

This question has already led to some changes, which will appear in the next release of Cesil – adding comment writing methods that take ReadOnlySpan<char> and ReadOnlyMemory<char> parameters, clarifying some parameter names, and returning counts of the number of rows written from the enumerable taking write methods.

Remember that, as part of the sustainable open source experiment I detailed in the first post of this series, any commentary from a Tier 2 GitHub Sponsor will be addressed in a future comment or post. Feedback from non-sponsors will receive equal consideration, but may not be directly addressed.

In my next post I’ll cover how Cesil supports writing dynamic types, those not known at compile time. As you might expect from reading static and dynamic types, it is very similar to how static types are read…

Overthinking CSV With Cesil: Reading Dynamic Types

Posted: 2020/06/08 | Author: | Filed under: code | Tags: | Comments Off on Overthinking CSV With Cesil: Reading Dynamic Types

In my last post I went over how to use Cesil to deserialize to known, static, types. Since version 4.0, C# has also had a notion of dynamic types – ones whose bindings, members, and conversions are all resolved at runtime – and Cesil also supports deserializing into these.

In 2020, supporting dynamic isn’t exactly a given – dynamic is relatively rare in the .NET ecosystem, the big “Iron” use cases in 2015 (dynamic languages running on .NET) are all dead as far as I can tell, and the static-vs-dynamic-typing pendulum has been swinging back towards static with the increasing popularity of languages like Go, Rust, and TypeScript (even Python supports type annotations these days). All that said, I still believe there are niches in C# well served by dynamic – “quick and dirty” data loading without declaring types, and loading heterogeneous data. These are both niches Cesil aims to support well, and therefore dynamic support is a first-class feature.

Part of being a first-class feature means that all the flexibility and ease of use from static types is also present when working with dynamic. There aren’t any new types or interfaces, just use Configuration.ForDynamic() instead of Configuration.For<TRow>(), Options.DynamicDefault (which assumes a header row is present) instead of Options.Default (which will detect if a header row is present or not, which isn’t possible with unknown types), and the EnumerateDynamicXXX() methods on CesilUtils. The same readers with the same methods are all available, only now instead of some concrete T you’ll get a dynamic back. And, while dynamic operation does impose additional overhead, Cesil still aims for dynamic operations to be reasonably performant – within a factor of 3 or so of their static equivalent.

Regardless of the Options used, the dynamic rows returned by Cesil always support:

  • Casting to IDisposable
  • Calling the Dispose() method
  • Get accessor with an int (ie. someRow[0]), which returns a dynamic cell
    • This will throw if the int is out of bounds
  • Get accessor with a column name (ie. someRow[“someColumn”]), which returns a dynamic cell
    • If there was no header row present when reading (or if the column name is not found), this will throw
  • Get accessor with an Index (ie. someRow[^1]), which returns a dynamic cell
    • This will throw if the Index is out of bounds
  • Get accessor with a Range (ie. someRow[1..2]), which returns a dynamic row
    • This will throw if the Range is out of bounds
  • Get accessor with a ColumnIdentifier (ie. someRow[ColumnIdentifier.Create(3)]), which returns a dynamic cell

Likewise, regardless of the Options used, dynamic cells (obtained by indexing a dynamic row per above) always support casting to IConvertible. IConvertible is a temperamental interface, so Cesil’s implementation is limited – it doesn’t support non-null IFormatProviders, and makes a very coarse attempt at determining TypeCode. Basically, Cesil does just enough for the various methods on Convert to work “as you’d expect” for dynamic cells.

Just like with static deserialization, the ITypeDescriber on the Options used to create the IBoundConfiguration<TRow> controls how values are mapped to types. The differences are that dynamic conversions are discovered each time they occur (versus once, for static types) and conversion decisions are deferred until a cast (versus happening during reading, for static types). Dynamic deserialization does not allow custom InstanceProviders (as the dynamic backing infrastructure is provided directly by Cesil) – however the XXXWithReuse() methods on I(Async)Reader<TRow> still allow for some control over allocations.

Customization of dynamic conversions can be done with the DynamicRowConverter type (for rows) and the ITypeDescriber.GetDynamicCellParserFor() method (for cells). I’ll dig further into these capabilities in a later post. Out of the box, the DefaultTypeDescriber (used by Options.DynamicDefault) implements the conversions you would expect.

Namely, for dynamic rows Cesil’s defaults allow conversion to:

  • Object
  • Tuples
    • Rows with more than 7 columns can be mapped to nested Tuples using TRest generic parameter
  • ValueTuples, including those with a TRest parameter
    • Rows with more than 7 columns can be mapped to nested ValueTuples using TRest generic parameter
  • IEnumerable<T>
    • Each cell is lazily converted to T
  • IEnumerable
    • Each cell becomes an object, with no conversion occurring
  • Any type with a constructor taking the same number of parameters as the row has columns
    • Each cell is converted to the expected parameter type
  • Any type with a constructor taking zero parameter, provided the row has column names
    • Any properties (public or private, static or instance) whose name matches a column name will be set to the column’s value

If no conversion is possible, Cesil will raise an exception. If a conversion is chosen that requires converting cells to static values, those conversions may also fail and raise exceptions.

For dynamic cells, Cesil’s defaults allow conversion to:

As with rows, finding no conversion or having a conversion fail will cause Cesil to raise an exception.

And that covers the why and what of dynamic deserialization in Cesil. This post leaves me with two Open Questions:

  1. Are there any useful dynamic operations around reading that are missing from Cesil?
  2. Do the conversions provided by the DefaultTypeDescriber for dynamic rows and cells cover all common use cases?

As before, I’ve opened two issues to gather long form responses.  Remember that, as part of the sustainable open source experiment I detailed in the first post of this series, any commentary from a Tier 2 GitHub Sponsor will be addressed in a future comment or post. Feedback from non-sponsors will receive equal consideration, but may not be directly addressed.

Next time I’ll dive into the write operations Cesil supports, starting with static types.

Overthinking CSV With Cesil: Reading Known Types

Posted: 2020/06/02 | Author: | Filed under: code | Tags: | Comments Off on Overthinking CSV With Cesil: Reading Known Types

The most common operation for a C# serialization library is usually reading into a known, static, type. That is, you’re given a stream or a blob of bytes and need to turn it into an instance of some type T. Cesil aims to make this common operation simple, fast, and customizable.

For cases where performance and customization are less important, CesilUtils exposes a bunch of EnumerateXXX methods. Both synchronous and asynchronous versions available, but all methods return results lazily.

Maximum performance and flexibility is found in using either IReader<TRow> or IAsyncReader<TRow> interfaces, obtained from an IBoundConfiguration<TRow> created via Configuration.For<TRow>. Unlike CesilUtils, using these interfaces lets you cache and reuse an IBoundConfiguration<TRow> and allow you to read comments and reuse rows.

Concretely, I(Async)Reader<TRow> methods let you:

Determining what members on the given TRow type map to which columns, how those columns should be parsed, and how members should be set is done with the ITypeDescriber registered on the Options provided to Configuration.For<TRow> or the method on CesilUtils (by default, this is an instance of DefaultTypeDescriber). When an IBoundConfiguration<TRow> is created ITypeDescriber.EnumerateMembersToDeserialize is invoked once and the returned DeserializableMembers detail how Cesil will map rows of data to TRow instances.

Preciesly, you can specify

  • The name of the column a member maps to
    • If a CSV lacks a header row, the order of the DeserializableMembers will be used to match columns instead
  • The Parser to use to turn a ReadOnlySpan into a specific type
  • An (optional) Reset to call before setting a member
  • The Setter to use to place the type created by the Parser on a member of TRow
  • Whether or not a member is required

A separate call to ITypeDescriber.GetInstanceProvider will be made to obtain an InstanceProvider which is used to get TRow instances needed when reading a row. While the call to get the InstanceProvider always happens, the InstanceProvider won’t be used if the XXXWithReuse methods are called with a non-null TRow reference. InstanceProviders allow you to implement sophisticated row re-use or initialization logic that a simple “ref TRow” isn’t adequate for.

There’s a great deal of flexibility in how InstanceProviders, Parsers, Resets, and Setters can be created which will be covered in a later post.

Internally, Cesil models reading a CSV as transitions through a state machine. Each character read is mapped to a CharacterType (one of EscapeStartAndEnd, Escape, ValueSeparator, CarriageReturn, LineFeed, CommentStart, Whitespace, Other, and DataEnd), which is then used in conjunction with the current State to look up a TransitionRule. TransitionRules specify the new State as well as an AdvanceResult, which instructs Cesil to take certain actions (like skipping the character, appending a character to the read buffer, finishing a column or row, etc.). Only the mapping from char to CharacterType is dependent on the configured Options, Cesil pre-allocates and reuses the TransitionRules that back the state machine.

Although Cesil’s state machine progresses one character at a time, Cesil reads multiple-characters at a time in order to maximize performance and better match modern C# interfaces like PipeReader. Control over the read buffer’s size is provided through ReadBufferSizeHint. Cesil also batches certain common AdvanceResults, like skipping or appending characters, so that the overhead of certain method calls is minimized in hot paths.

Taken altogether, and at a very high level, when Cesil reads a single row this is what happens:

  1. Characters are read into the read buffer, if it is empty
    1. If there are no more characters to read into the buffer, proceed as if we have read a single EndOfData CharacterType.
  2. If no instance of TRow has been provided, Cesil obtains one using the InstanceProvider
  3. For each character in the read buffer…
    1. The character is mapped to a CharacterType
    2. The current State and CharacterType are used to find the next State and an AdvanceResult

      1. If the AdvanceResult is batchable, note is made of it but no action is taken
      2. If the AdvanceResult is not batchable, any pending batched actions are taken and then the new action is taken
        1. If the AdvanceResult finishes a value, the current pending value is Parsed, the Reset for the current column is called (if it exists), the Setter is called
        2. If the AdvanceResult finishes a record, we return the row and are finished
    3. Remove the read character from the buffer
  4. If we haven’t returned a row, go back to 1

There are a few consequences of this design:

  1. There can be pending data in the read buffer when a row is returned, which means that you cannot use Cesil to read “up to a particular row” in the underlying data stream. Once Cesil starts reading, no guarantees are made about the state of the underlying stream.
  2. For maximum performance it’s worth reusing IBoundConfigurations, as a decent amount of reflection and lookup creation happens when one is created. All I(Async)Readers that one creates will reuse that work, making a cache very efficient.
  3. In asynchronous cases, Cesil will await only when the read buffer is empty and cannot be filled without blocking. This means that Cesil can “go async” much less frequently than might naively be expected, were it to be reading characters one at a time.

Finally, Cesil does offer support for reading whole line CSV comments. Although non-standard and rather rare, they arise often enough to be worth supporting. The reader interfaces expose TryReadWithComment(WithReuse)(Async) methods that return a ReadWithCommentResult, a tagged union type that wraps the comment or row read. In order to read comments, Options.CommentCharacter must have been set when the IBoundConfiguration<TRow> was created – calling any of the XXXWithComment methods when it has not been set will raise an exception. If a comment is encountered when a non-XXXWithComment method is invoked, but Options was configured with comment support, the comment will be silently skipped.

That wraps up what static deserialization looks like in Cesil.

The Open Question for this post is the same as the previous post, but with a particular focus on reading: Is there anything missing from IReader(Async) that you’d expect to be supported in a modern .NET CSV library?

This question has already led to some planned changes, namely removing the class constraint on I(Async)Reader’s TCollection generic parameter, and adding comment writing methods that take ReadOnlySpan<char> and ReadOnlyMemory<char> parameters.

Remember that, as part of the sustainable open source experiment I detailed in the first post of this series, any commentary from a Tier 2 GitHub Sponsor will be addressed in a future comment or post. Feedback from non-sponsors will receive equal consideration, but may not be directly addressed.

Next time I’ll be discussing reading dynamic types, and why I think that’s still worth supporting in 2020…