[Mono-list] Fast Passing Strings to Interop without Marshaling

[Bradford Stephens]

Greetings,

We're passing very large strings to a C program in Linux through Mono
via Interop. The C program takes a (char*), and our C# program uses a
String.

The problem is that these strings can be 100kB+, and there seems to be
a large performance impact. Often, just passing the string along takes
over 150 milliseconds.

Any suggestions on how to do this faster? Can I pass a reference to
the string or some sort of char array without Marshaling it? I'm
pretty sure the performance hit comes from copying everything during
the marshaling process. I know it can be a tricky problem because C
chars are 1 byte, and C# are 2.

Cheers,
Bradford