Matt Warren • 9/19/2016

Compact strings in the CLR

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This technical article analyzes how strings are stored as UTF-16 in the .NET CLR and proposes a 'compact strings' implementation. It argues that many strings in real-world applications (like URLs, HTTP headers) are ASCII-compatible, and storing them in a 1-byte-per-character encoding could save significant memory. The post includes a compelling case study using a memory dump from Stack Overflow, showing potential compression of string data from over 3.5 GB to under 1.9 GB.

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#encoding #Memory #Strings
Compact strings in the CLR

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