Fast copy of Color32[] array to byte[] array

Question

What would be a fast method to copy/convert an array of Color32[] values to a byte[] buffer? Color32 is

Answer 1

With modern .NET, you can use spans for this:

var bytes = MemoryMarshal.Cast(colors);

This gives you a Span that covers the same data. The API is directly comparable to using vectors (byte[]), but it isn't actually a vector, and there is no copy: you are directly accessing the original data. It is like an unsafe pointer coercion, but: entirely safe.

If you need it as a vector, ToArray and copy methods exist for that.