.NET 7 warning: use ‘GeneratedRegexAttribute’ (SYSLIB1045)

by

.NET 7 introduced the [GeneratedRegex] attribute that allows doing some regex initialization in compile time rather than in runtime. Using this attribute might help improve performance. Therefore some tooling might start showing you a warning that you miss an opportunity for free performance gains 🙂

SYSLIB1045 Use ‘GeneratedRegexAttribute’ to generate the regular expression implementation at compile-time.

Since the documentation is scarce at the moment, I’ll share a simple example of how you can resolve that warning from my own experience:

Code before the change

// OLD IMPLEMENTATION
private static readonly Regex MultipleWhitespacesRegex = new(@"\s+");
private string OldImplementation(string input) => MultipleWhitespacesRegex.Replace(input, " ");Code language: C# (cs)

Code after the recommended change

// NEW IMPLEMENTATION
[GeneratedRegex(@"\s+")]
private static partial Regex MultipleWhitespacesGeneratedRegex();
private string NewImplementation(string input) => MultipleWhitespacesGeneratedRegex().Replace(input, " ");

// please note, the class where this field is located must also now be declared as partial!Code language: C# (cs)

A quick benchmark

Even though I changed this only to resolve warnings in the codebase, I couldn’t resist seeing if there was a noticeable performance difference when the new attribute was used. And although my regular expression was extremely simple, the new approach still performed slightly better:

Benchmark results of a simple code after implementing the recommended solution for SYSLIB1045: use GeneratedRegex Attribute. See the benchmark code here.

As always, when we talk about performance, results may vary. You should not assume that something is faster just because it should be, etc. You know the drill 😉

Leave a Comment