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copied!<p>Honestly, I'm a little bothered by everyone shouting "premature optimization!" Here's why.</p> <ol> <li>What you say makes perfect sense, <em>particularly</em> as you have already indicated you are working on a high-performance library.</li> <li>Even BCL classes follow this pattern. Consider all the overloads of <code>string.Format</code> or <code>Console.WriteLine</code>.</li> <li>This is <strong>very easy to get right</strong>. The whole premise behind the movement <em>against</em> premature optimization is that when you do something <em>tricky</em> for the purposes of optimizing performance, you're liable to break something by accident and make your code less maintainable. I don't see how that's a danger here; it should be very straightforward what you're doing, to yourself as well as any future developer who may deal with your code.</li> </ol> <p>Also, even if you <em>profiled</em> the results of both approaches and saw only a very small difference in speed, there's still the issue of memory allocation. Creating a new array for every method call entails allocating more memory that will need to be garbage collected later. And in some scenarios where "nearly" real-time behavior is desired (such as algorithmic trading, the field <em>I'm</em> in), minimizing garbage collections is just as important as maximizing execution speed.</p> <p>So, even if it earns me some downvotes: I say go for it.</p> <p>(And to those who claim "the compiler surely already does something like this"--I wouldn't be so sure. Firstly, if that were the case, I fail to see why BCL classes would follow this pattern, as I've already mentioned. But more importantly, there is a very big semantic difference between a method that accepts <em>multiple arguments</em> and one that accepts an <em>array</em>. Just because one <em>can</em> be used as a substitute for the other doesn't mean the compiler would, or <em>should</em>, attempt such a substitution).</p>

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