Question

I’m trying to figure out the best way to store large binary (more than 96 bit) numbers in C#

I’m building application that will automatically allocate workers for shifts. Shifts can be as short as 15 minutes (but this might be even smaller in the future). To avoid double-booking of workers, I plan to have binary map of their daily time: 24 hours separated in equal chunks (15 minutes) and every chunk has a flag (0 for free, 1 for busy)
So when we try to give another shift to a worker, we can do binary comparison of workers daily availability with shift’s time. Simple and easy to decide.

But C# long only allows to have up to 64 bit, and with the current set up I need at least 96 bits (24 hours * 60 minutes / 15 minutes per period).
This representation must be memory friendly, as there will be about a million objects operated at a time.

Few other options i considered:

• String. Memory-hungry, not simple to implement bit-wise operations
• Array of bits. But as far as I know C# does not have bit type
• Array of unsigned integers. Each array represents only part of a day. The best I can think of

Any other suggestions??

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You could use and array of bytes. I don’t think any language supports an array of bits, as a byte is the smallest addressable piece of memory. Other options are an array of booleans, but each boolean I believe is stored as a byte anyway, so there would be wasted memory, but it might be easier to work with. It really depends on how many days you are going to work with. You could also just store the start and end of the shift and use other means to figure out if there are overlapping schedules. This would probably make the most sense, and be the easiest to debug.