Fastest way to remove first char in a String

Question

Say we have the following string

string data= \"/temp string\";

If we want to remove the first character / we can do by a lot

Answer 1

I know this is hyper-optimization land, but it seemed like a good excuse to kick the wheels of BenchmarkDotNet. The result of this test (on .NET Core even) is that Substring is ever so slightly faster than Remove, in this sample test: 19.37ns vs 22.52ns for Remove. So some ~16% faster.

using System;
using BenchmarkDotNet.Attributes;

namespace BenchmarkFun
{
    public class StringSubstringVsRemove
    {
        public readonly string SampleString = " My name is Daffy Duck.";

        [Benchmark]
        public string StringSubstring() => SampleString.Substring(1);

        [Benchmark]
        public string StringRemove() => SampleString.Remove(0, 1);

        public void AssertTestIsValid()
        {
            string subsRes = StringSubstring();
            string remvRes = StringRemove();

            if (subsRes == null
                || subsRes.Length != SampleString.Length - 1
                || subsRes != remvRes) {
                throw new Exception("INVALID TEST!");
            }
        }
    }

    class Program
    {
        static void Main()
        {
            // let's make sure test results are really equal / valid
            new StringSubstringVsRemove().AssertTestIsValid();

            var summary = BenchmarkRunner.Run();
        }
    }
}

Results:

BenchmarkDotNet=v0.11.4, OS=Windows 10.0.17763.253 (1809/October2018Update/Redstone5)
Intel Core i7-6700HQ CPU 2.60GHz (Skylake), 1 CPU, 8 logical and 4 physical cores
.NET Core SDK=3.0.100-preview-010184
  [Host]     : .NET Core 3.0.0-preview-27324-5 (CoreCLR 4.6.27322.0, CoreFX 4.7.19.7311), 64bit RyuJIT
  DefaultJob : .NET Core 3.0.0-preview-27324-5 (CoreCLR 4.6.27322.0, CoreFX 4.7.19.7311), 64bit RyuJIT

|          Method |     Mean |     Error |    StdDev |
|---------------- |---------:|----------:|----------:|
| StringSubstring | 19.37 ns | 0.3940 ns | 0.3493 ns |
|    StringRemove | 22.52 ns | 0.4062 ns | 0.3601 ns |