linq-fast

A TypeScript implementation of .NET Linq / Enumerable for deferred evaluation, focussed on speed

 

Working versions of all Enumerable methods are implemented and the library is ready for use

Future updates will focus on performance enhancements and greater test coverage

 

Usage

Usage is simple, to obtain a collection, wrap any Iterable with a call to the linq function and then chain additional methods as required, e.g.:

linq([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]).where(num => num >= 3).select(num => num + 1).toArray();

// [4, 5, 6] 

Use in any iterable context, e.g. a for loop

let collection = linq([1, 2, 3]);
let oddNumbers = collection.where(num => num % 2 === 1);

for(let item of oddNumbers) {
    console.log(item);
}

 

Dependencies

No 3rd party libs, only the vanilla JS standard library (The test suite uses Jasmine)

This library can be used in browsers or NodeJS projects, some notes for older browser compatibility follow:

This library depends heavily on iterators and generator functions and uses lamda functions liberally, so in order to target some older browsers (cough IE cough) you will need to run through some kind of downlevelling compiler, i.e. Babel/TypeScript

The only other potential compatibility issue is that the longCount() method has return type of bigint which is not widely supported at the time of writing. bigint was used instead of number not only because it is a more appropriate substitute for the .NET long/int64 data type, but also because just using number would make this method identical to count(). If you're having issues with an environment that doesn't support bigint, avoid using this method or simply shim BigInt = Number and it should work for most use cases

 

Differences from .NET

The method signatures are largely the same as their .NET counterparts, except that case has been changed to match JS conventions, differences are kept to a minimum and are due to limitations in the language/library:

 

• Enumerable<T> instead of IEnumerable<T>, this is to better signify what this version represents, an actual collection of objects with methods rather than an interface with extension methods

• toList() returns a JS array, which makes it identical in function to toArray(), JS arrays are already similar to the .NET list type in that they can be dynamically resized. The toArray() method could have been mapped to a fixed-length array, but that would likely be unintuitive for most use cases.

• groupBy(), toDictionary(), toLookup() These methods all have multiple overloads with function parameters. Without any reliable way to detect which overload is being called, these have been overloaded with the most simple/common overloads staying the same and some parameters, usually a comparer, being encapsulated into an object parameter

• comparer Many methods take an optional comparer argument for custom equality checking, usually .NET types have built-in comparer options you can use or write your own. Here, these have been implemented as an optional callback function for determining equality, which defaults to the strict equality (===) operator if not provided. There may be some support for comparer types in the future but backwards compatibility with the existing approach will be maintained

• toHashSet(), toDictionary(), toLookup() - These methods make use of the .NET types HashSet<T>, Dictionary<TKey, TValue> and Lookup<TKey, TValue>, these have been mapped to their closest counterparts in JS, Set<T>, Map<TKey, TValue> and Map<TKey, Enumerable<TValue>> respectively. It is worth noting that these objects differ slightly from their .NET counterparts and although a custom comparer can be provided for the latter two, this will only be used when constructing the returned Map. Also it is worth noting that in order to use more Enumerable functions on these objects, you will need to wrap an iterable with the linq() function again, as these native objects do not have innate support for this library