Outside of the 10 elements case, I don't think it's an overhead issue, the overhead is surely minuscule compared to the 1GB of data in the final tests, which al

Outside of the 10 elements case, I don't think it's an overhead issue, the overhead is surely minuscule compared to the 1GB of data in the final tests, which also show a large difference in performance. I suspect it's that the memcmp in the Visual C++ redistributable isn't as optimised for modern processor instructions as the .NET runtime is. I'd be interested to see a comparison against a better more optimised runtime library. Ultimately you're right that neither .NET nor C can magic out performance from a processor that isn't fundamentally there, but it's nice that doing the out-of-the-box approach performs well and doesn't require tricks.