Comparing two byte arrays in .NET

You can use Enumerable.SequenceEqual method.

using System;
using System.Linq;
...
var a1 = new int[] { 1, 2, 3};
var a2 = new int[] { 1, 2, 3};
var a3 = new int[] { 1, 2, 4};
var x = a1.SequenceEqual(a2); // true
var y = a1.SequenceEqual(a3); // false

If you can't use .NET 3.5 for some reason, your method is OK.
Compiler\run-time environment will optimize your loop so you don't need to worry about performance.

Span<T> offers an extremely competitive alternative without having to throw confusing and/or non-portable fluff into your own application's code base:

// byte[] is implicitly convertible to ReadOnlySpan<byte>
static bool ByteArrayCompare(ReadOnlySpan<byte> a1, ReadOnlySpan<byte> a2)
{
    return a1.SequenceEqual(a2);
}

The (guts of the) implementation as of .NET 6.0.4 can be found here.

I've revised @EliArbel's gist to add this method as SpansEqual, drop most of the less interesting performers in others' benchmarks, run it with different array sizes, output graphs, and mark SpansEqual as the baseline so that it reports how the different methods compare to SpansEqual.

The below numbers are from the results, lightly edited to remove "Error" column.

|        Method |  ByteCount |               Mean |          StdDev | Ratio | RatioSD |
|-------------- |----------- |-------------------:|----------------:|------:|--------:|
|    SpansEqual |         15 |           2.074 ns |       0.0233 ns |  1.00 |    0.00 |
|  LongPointers |         15 |           2.854 ns |       0.0632 ns |  1.38 |    0.03 |
|      Unrolled |         15 |          12.449 ns |       0.2487 ns |  6.00 |    0.13 |
| PInvokeMemcmp |         15 |           7.525 ns |       0.1057 ns |  3.63 |    0.06 |
|               |            |                    |                 |       |         |
|    SpansEqual |       1026 |          15.629 ns |       0.1712 ns |  1.00 |    0.00 |
|  LongPointers |       1026 |          46.487 ns |       0.2938 ns |  2.98 |    0.04 |
|      Unrolled |       1026 |          23.786 ns |       0.1044 ns |  1.52 |    0.02 |
| PInvokeMemcmp |       1026 |          28.299 ns |       0.2781 ns |  1.81 |    0.03 |
|               |            |                    |                 |       |         |
|    SpansEqual |    1048585 |      17,920.329 ns |     153.0750 ns |  1.00 |    0.00 |
|  LongPointers |    1048585 |      42,077.448 ns |     309.9067 ns |  2.35 |    0.02 |
|      Unrolled |    1048585 |      29,084.901 ns |     428.8496 ns |  1.62 |    0.03 |
| PInvokeMemcmp |    1048585 |      30,847.572 ns |     213.3162 ns |  1.72 |    0.02 |
|               |            |                    |                 |       |         |
|    SpansEqual | 2147483591 | 124,752,376.667 ns | 552,281.0202 ns |  1.00 |    0.00 |
|  LongPointers | 2147483591 | 139,477,269.231 ns | 331,458.5429 ns |  1.12 |    0.00 |
|      Unrolled | 2147483591 | 137,617,423.077 ns | 238,349.5093 ns |  1.10 |    0.00 |
| PInvokeMemcmp | 2147483591 | 138,373,253.846 ns | 288,447.8278 ns |  1.11 |    0.01 |

I was surprised to see SpansEqual not come out on top for the max-array-size methods, but the difference is so minor that I don't think it'll ever matter. After refreshing to run on .NET 6.0.4 with my newer hardware, SpansEqual now comfortably outperforms all others at all array sizes.

My system info:

BenchmarkDotNet=v0.13.1, OS=Windows 10.0.22000
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 1 CPU, 24 logical and 12 physical cores
.NET SDK=6.0.202
  [Host]     : .NET 6.0.4 (6.0.422.16404), X64 RyuJIT
  DefaultJob : .NET 6.0.4 (6.0.422.16404), X64 RyuJIT

If you are not opposed to doing it, you can import the J# assembly "vjslib.dll" and use its Arrays.equals(byte[], byte[]) method...

Don't blame me if someone laughs at you though...

EDIT: For what little it is worth, I used Reflector to disassemble the code for that, and here is what it looks like:

public static bool equals(sbyte[] a1, sbyte[] a2)
{
  if (a1 == a2)
  {
    return true;
  }
  if ((a1 != null) && (a2 != null))
  {
    if (a1.Length != a2.Length)
    {
      return false;
    }
    for (int i = 0; i < a1.Length; i++)
    {
      if (a1[i] != a2[i])
      {
        return false;
      }
    }
    return true;
  }
  return false;
}

.NET 3.5 and newer have a new public type, System.Data.Linq.Binary that encapsulates byte[]. It implements IEquatable<Binary> that (in effect) compares two byte arrays. Note that System.Data.Linq.Binary also has implicit conversion operator from byte[].

MSDN documentation:System.Data.Linq.Binary

Reflector decompile of the Equals method:

private bool EqualsTo(Binary binary)
{
    if (this != binary)
    {
        if (binary == null)
        {
            return false;
        }
        if (this.bytes.Length != binary.bytes.Length)
        {
            return false;
        }
        if (this.hashCode != binary.hashCode)
        {
            return false;
        }
        int index = 0;
        int length = this.bytes.Length;
        while (index < length)
        {
            if (this.bytes[index] != binary.bytes[index])
            {
                return false;
            }
            index++;
        }
    }
    return true;
}

Interesting twist is that they only proceed to byte-by-byte comparison loop if hashes of the two Binary objects are the same. This, however, comes at the cost of computing the hash in constructor of Binary objects (by traversing the array with for loop :-) ).

The above implementation means that in the worst case you may have to traverse the arrays three times: first to compute hash of array1, then to compute hash of array2 and finally (because this is the worst case scenario, lengths and hashes equal) to compare bytes in array1 with bytes in array 2.

Overall, even though System.Data.Linq.Binary is built into BCL, I don't think it is the fastest way to compare two byte arrays :-|.

 using System.Linq; //SequenceEqual

 byte[] ByteArray1 = null;
 byte[] ByteArray2 = null;

 ByteArray1 = MyFunct1();
 ByteArray2 = MyFunct2();

 if (ByteArray1.SequenceEqual<byte>(ByteArray2) == true)
 {
    MessageBox.Show("Match");
 }
 else
 {
   MessageBox.Show("Don't match");
 }

I would use unsafe code and run the for loop comparing Int32 pointers.

Maybe you should also consider checking the arrays to be non-null.

If you look at how .NET does string.Equals, you see that it uses a private method called EqualsHelper which has an "unsafe" pointer implementation. .NET Reflector is your friend to see how things are done internally.

This can be used as a template for byte array comparison which I did an implementation on in blog post Fast byte array comparison in C#. I also did some rudimentary benchmarks to see when a safe implementation is faster than the unsafe.

That said, unless you really need killer performance, I'd go for a simple fr loop comparison.

For those of you that care about order (i.e. want your memcmp to return an int like it should instead of nothing), .NET Core 3.0 (and presumably .NET Standard 2.1 aka .NET 5.0) will include a Span.SequenceCompareTo(...) extension method (plus a Span.SequenceEqualTo) that can be used to compare two ReadOnlySpan<T> instances (where T: IComparable<T>).

In the original GitHub proposal, the discussion included approach comparisons with jump table calculations, reading a byte[] as long[], SIMD usage, and p/invoke to the CLR implementation's memcmp.

Going forward, this should be your go-to method for comparing byte arrays or byte ranges (as should using Span<byte> instead of byte[] for your .NET Standard 2.1 APIs), and it is sufficiently fast enough that you should no longer care about optimizing it (and no, despite the similarities in name it does not perform as abysmally as the horrid Enumerable.SequenceEqual).

#if NETCOREAPP3_0_OR_GREATER
// Using the platform-native Span<T>.SequenceEqual<T>(..)
public static int Compare(byte[] range1, int offset1, byte[] range2, int offset2, int count)
{
    var span1 = range1.AsSpan(offset1, count);
    var span2 = range2.AsSpan(offset2, count);

    return span1.SequenceCompareTo(span2);
    // or, if you don't care about ordering
    // return span1.SequenceEqual(span2);
}
#else
// The most basic implementation, in platform-agnostic, safe C#
public static bool Compare(byte[] range1, int offset1, byte[] range2, int offset2, int count)
{
    // Working backwards lets the compiler optimize away bound checking after the first loop
    for (int i = count - 1; i >= 0; --i)
    {
        if (range1[offset1 + i] != range2[offset2 + i])
        {
            return false;
        }
    }

    return true;
}
#endif

I did some measurements using attached program .net 4.7 release build without the debugger attached. I think people have been using the wrong metric since what you are about if you care about speed here is how long it takes to figure out if two byte arrays are equal. i.e. throughput in bytes.

StructuralComparison :              4.6 MiB/s
for                  :            274.5 MiB/s
ToUInt32             :            263.6 MiB/s
ToUInt64             :            474.9 MiB/s
memcmp               :           8500.8 MiB/s

As you can see, there's no better way than memcmp and it's orders of magnitude faster. A simple for loop is the second best option. And it still boggles my mind why Microsoft cannot simply include a Buffer.Compare method.

[Program.cs]:

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Linq;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace memcmp
{
    class Program
    {
        static byte[] TestVector(int size)
        {
            var data = new byte[size];
            using (var rng = new System.Security.Cryptography.RNGCryptoServiceProvider())
            {
                rng.GetBytes(data);
            }
            return data;
        }

        static TimeSpan Measure(string testCase, TimeSpan offset, Action action, bool ignore = false)
        {
            var t = Stopwatch.StartNew();
            var n = 0L;
            while (t.Elapsed < TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10))
            {
                action();
                n++;
            }
            var elapsed = t.Elapsed - offset;
            if (!ignore)
            {
                Console.WriteLine($"{testCase,-16} : {n / elapsed.TotalSeconds,16:0.0} MiB/s");
            }
            return elapsed;
        }

        [DllImport("msvcrt.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
        static extern int memcmp(byte[] b1, byte[] b2, long count);

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // how quickly can we establish if two sequences of bytes are equal?

            // note that we are testing the speed of different comparsion methods

            var a = TestVector(1024 * 1024); // 1 MiB
            var b = (byte[])a.Clone();

            // was meant to offset the overhead of everything but copying but my attempt was a horrible mistake... should have reacted sooner due to the initially ridiculous throughput values...
            // Measure("offset", new TimeSpan(), () => { return; }, ignore: true);
            var offset = TimeZone.Zero

            Measure("StructuralComparison", offset, () =>
            {
                StructuralComparisons.StructuralEqualityComparer.Equals(a, b);
            });

            Measure("for", offset, () =>
            {
                for (int i = 0; i < a.Length; i++)
                {
                    if (a[i] != b[i]) break;
                }
            });

            Measure("ToUInt32", offset, () =>
            {
                for (int i = 0; i < a.Length; i += 4)
                {
                    if (BitConverter.ToUInt32(a, i) != BitConverter.ToUInt32(b, i)) break;
                }
            });

            Measure("ToUInt64", offset, () =>
            {
                for (int i = 0; i < a.Length; i += 8)
                {
                    if (BitConverter.ToUInt64(a, i) != BitConverter.ToUInt64(b, i)) break;
                }
            });

            Measure("memcmp", offset, () =>
            {
                memcmp(a, b, a.Length);
            });
        }
    }
}

It seems that EqualBytesLongUnrolled is the best from the above suggested.

Skipped methods (Enumerable.SequenceEqual,StructuralComparisons.StructuralEqualityComparer.Equals), were not-patient-for-slow. On 265MB arrays I have measured this:

Host Process Environment Information:
BenchmarkDotNet.Core=v0.9.9.0
OS=Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0
Processor=Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU 3.40GHz, ProcessorCount=8
Frequency=3323582 ticks, Resolution=300.8802 ns, Timer=TSC
CLR=MS.NET 4.0.30319.42000, Arch=64-bit RELEASE [RyuJIT]
GC=Concurrent Workstation
JitModules=clrjit-v4.6.1590.0

Type=CompareMemoriesBenchmarks  Mode=Throughput  

                 Method |      Median |    StdDev | Scaled | Scaled-SD |
----------------------- |------------ |---------- |------- |---------- |
             NewMemCopy |  30.0443 ms | 1.1880 ms |   1.00 |      0.00 |
 EqualBytesLongUnrolled |  29.9917 ms | 0.7480 ms |   0.99 |      0.04 |
          msvcrt_memcmp |  30.0930 ms | 0.2964 ms |   1.00 |      0.03 |
          UnsafeCompare |  31.0520 ms | 0.7072 ms |   1.03 |      0.04 |
       ByteArrayCompare | 212.9980 ms | 2.0776 ms |   7.06 |      0.25 |

OS=Windows
Processor=?, ProcessorCount=8
Frequency=3323582 ticks, Resolution=300.8802 ns, Timer=TSC
CLR=CORE, Arch=64-bit ? [RyuJIT]
GC=Concurrent Workstation
dotnet cli version: 1.0.0-preview2-003131

Type=CompareMemoriesBenchmarks  Mode=Throughput  

                 Method |      Median |    StdDev | Scaled | Scaled-SD |
----------------------- |------------ |---------- |------- |---------- |
             NewMemCopy |  30.1789 ms | 0.0437 ms |   1.00 |      0.00 |
 EqualBytesLongUnrolled |  30.1985 ms | 0.1782 ms |   1.00 |      0.01 |
          msvcrt_memcmp |  30.1084 ms | 0.0660 ms |   1.00 |      0.00 |
          UnsafeCompare |  31.1845 ms | 0.4051 ms |   1.03 |      0.01 |
       ByteArrayCompare | 212.0213 ms | 0.1694 ms |   7.03 |      0.01 |

I have not seen many linq solutions here.

I am not sure of the performance implications, however I generally stick to linq as rule of thumb and then optimize later if necessary.

public bool CompareTwoArrays(byte[] array1, byte[] array2)
 {
   return !array1.Where((t, i) => t != array2[i]).Any();
 }

Please do note this only works if they are the same size arrays. an extension could look like so

public bool CompareTwoArrays(byte[] array1, byte[] array2)
 {
   if (array1.Length != array2.Length) return false;
   return !array1.Where((t, i) => t != array2[i]).Any();
 }

I thought about block-transfer acceleration methods built into many graphics cards. But then you would have to copy over all the data byte-wise, so this doesn't help you much if you don't want to implement a whole portion of your logic in unmanaged and hardware-dependent code...

Another way of optimization similar to the approach shown above would be to store as much of your data as possible in a long[] rather than a byte[] right from the start, for example if you are reading it sequentially from a binary file, or if you use a memory mapped file, read in data as long[] or single long values. Then, your comparison loop will only need 1/8th of the number of iterations it would have to do for a byte[] containing the same amount of data. It is a matter of when and how often you need to compare vs. when and how often you need to access the data in a byte-by-byte manner, e.g. to use it in an API call as a parameter in a method that expects a byte[]. In the end, you only can tell if you really know the use case...

Sorry, if you're looking for a managed way you're already doing it correctly and to my knowledge there's no built in method in the BCL for doing this.

You should add some initial null checks and then just reuse it as if it where in BCL.

This is similar to others, but the difference here is that there is no falling through to the next highest number of bytes I can check at once, e.g. if I have 63 bytes (in my SIMD example) I can check the equality of the first 32 bytes, and then the last 32 bytes, which is faster than checking 32 bytes, 16 bytes, 8 bytes, and so on. The first check you enter is the only check you will need to compare all of the bytes.

This does come out on top in my tests, but just by a hair.

The following code is exactly how I tested it in airbreather/ArrayComparePerf.cs.

public unsafe bool SIMDNoFallThrough()    #requires  System.Runtime.Intrinsics.X86
{
    if (a1 == null || a2 == null)
        return false;

    int length0 = a1.Length;

    if (length0 != a2.Length) return false;

    fixed (byte* b00 = a1, b01 = a2)
    {
        byte* b0 = b00, b1 = b01, last0 = b0 + length0, last1 = b1 + length0, last32 = last0 - 31;

        if (length0 > 31)
        {
            while (b0 < last32)
            {
                if (Avx2.MoveMask(Avx2.CompareEqual(Avx.LoadVector256(b0), Avx.LoadVector256(b1))) != -1)
                    return false;
                b0 += 32;
                b1 += 32;
            }
            return Avx2.MoveMask(Avx2.CompareEqual(Avx.LoadVector256(last0 - 32), Avx.LoadVector256(last1 - 32))) == -1;
        }

        if (length0 > 15)
        {
            if (Sse2.MoveMask(Sse2.CompareEqual(Sse2.LoadVector128(b0), Sse2.LoadVector128(b1))) != 65535)
                return false;
            return Sse2.MoveMask(Sse2.CompareEqual(Sse2.LoadVector128(last0 - 16), Sse2.LoadVector128(last1 - 16))) == 65535;
        }

        if (length0 > 7)
        {
            if (*(ulong*)b0 != *(ulong*)b1)
                return false;
            return *(ulong*)(last0 - 8) == *(ulong*)(last1 - 8);
        }

        if (length0 > 3)
        {
            if (*(uint*)b0 != *(uint*)b1)
                return false;
            return *(uint*)(last0 - 4) == *(uint*)(last1 - 4);
        }

        if (length0 > 1)
        {
            if (*(ushort*)b0 != *(ushort*)b1)
                return false;
            return *(ushort*)(last0 - 2) == *(ushort*)(last1 - 2);
        }

        return *b0 == *b1;
    }
}

If no SIMD is preferred, the same method applied to the the existing LongPointers algorithm:

public unsafe bool LongPointersNoFallThrough()
{
    if (a1 == null || a2 == null || a1.Length != a2.Length)
        return false;
    fixed (byte* p1 = a1, p2 = a2)
    {
        byte* x1 = p1, x2 = p2;
        int l = a1.Length;
        if ((l & 8) != 0)
        {
            for (int i = 0; i < l / 8; i++, x1 += 8, x2 += 8)
                if (*(long*)x1 != *(long*)x2) return false;
            return *(long*)(x1 + (l - 8)) == *(long*)(x2 + (l - 8));
        }
        if ((l & 4) != 0)
        {
            if (*(int*)x1 != *(int*)x2) return false; x1 += 4; x2 += 4;
            return *(int*)(x1 + (l - 4)) == *(int*)(x2 + (l - 4));
        }
        if ((l & 2) != 0)
        {
            if (*(short*)x1 != *(short*)x2) return false; x1 += 2; x2 += 2;
            return *(short*)(x1 + (l - 2)) == *(short*)(x2 + (l - 2));
        }
        return *x1 == *x2;
    }
}

Since many of the fancy solutions above don't work with UWP and because I love Linq and functional approaches I pressent you my version to this problem. To escape the comparison when the first difference occures, I chose .FirstOrDefault()

public static bool CompareByteArrays(byte[] ba0, byte[] ba1) =>
    !(ba0.Length != ba1.Length || Enumerable.Range(1,ba0.Length)
        .FirstOrDefault(n => ba0[n] != ba1[n]) > 0);