Modernization

[kingcean]

This PR is a significant change of core library DiffPlex.

1. Add ReadOnlySpan<char> supports to differ and its accessories. At the same time, update the TFM to enable this feature on the available targets. This type is always used for some high performance scenarios to decrease unnecessary memory costs.
2. Refactor the builder models to remove the write-accessor of their properties since they are originally designed as data view of result. This breaking change ensures it comes to what to expect now. The incidental changes include updating their constructors to pass parameters instead of properties assignment.
3. Add full JSON serialization supports of builder models by implementing their bi-converters. But this also mean to add related package references like System.Text.Json for older TFM platforms, e.g. on .NET Frameworks. And please note this feature is disabled on .NET Strandard 1.0 because of not supported.
4. Suggest increase the major version (to v2.0) and please approach this PR with caution since the modification is wide-ranging. And of course, there is no change of the key logic and the overall mode. Additionally, the WPF components project and Windows App SDK (WinUI 3) components project are updated to adapt the new design.

[kingcean]

Sounds it can also fix #119 and #128 (but still keep the legacy frameworks).

[mmanela]

I will review soon. Thanks for the contribution

[mmanela]

I did an initial pass. @kingcean It looks great so far but a few comments

[mmanela]

What is this commented out code for?

[mmanela]

@kingcean Can you run benchmarks before before and after the changes and add the results to the PR description? I want to see if we have a measurable impact with this change. We may need to make this benchmark more interesting though

[mmanela]

It would be also good to use this to analyze what else we can improve.

[mmanela]

Should we move all versions to 2.0?

[mmanela]

Can you update the github actions test run to ensure we test both an older and a newer version? Not sure how hard this is, but would be nice to ensure things functions properly with and without the ifdef being true.

[mmanela]

@kingcean are you still interested in moving this forward?

[kingcean]

@kingcean are you still interested in moving this forward?

Sorry for the late reply, I will find time to follow up later.

[damienhoneyford]

Not sure if this PR is going anywhere as it's been sat for a long time now, but scanning through the changes to the core library, it only appears to have added the capability to pass a ReadOnlySpan<char> to the 'diff engine', it hasn't changed the inner workings of it, which means that the ReadOnlySpan<char> will be converted to a string (allocation) and then split in to multiple sub-strings (more allocations), thereby removing any gains you would have got from using the Span/ReadOnlySpan types.

Realistically though, it's not possible to simply rewrite it to use Span/ReadOnlySpan internally as they're 'ref structs' and can't be stored on the heap (can't use as class fields or within lists, etc.). The best optimisation would be to use StringSegment internally, which would remove the allocations from the sub-strings, but would still be a breaking change as it would require changes to the public API surface, and it still requires at least .NET Standard 2.0.