See my article on this very issue. Basically, beforefieldinit means “the type can be initialized at any point before any static fields are referenced.” In theory that means it can be very lazily initialized – if you call a static method which doesn’t touch any fields, the JIT doesn’t need to initialize the type. In … Read more
This is quirk of the decompiler you use to look at a .NET assembly. It is the behavior of ildasm.exe, other ones like Reflector or ILSpy get this right. The Microsoft programmer who wrote it took a shortcut, he generates a string from the IL that just displays the type argument the way it is … Read more
From ECMA 335, section 8.10.4 of partition 1: The CTS provides independent control over both the names that are visible from a base type (hiding) and the sharing of layout slots in the derived class (overriding). Hiding is controlled by marking a member in the derived class as either hide by name or hide by … Read more
There is a very simple way to always get the “fast” version of your program. Project > Properties > Build tab, untick the “Prefer 32-bit” option, ensure that the Platform target selection is AnyCPU. You really don’t prefer 32-bit, unfortunately is always turned on by default for C# projects. Historically, the Visual Studio toolset worked … Read more
I am pretty sure this is a compiler bug. Nice find! Edit: it is not a bug, as Quartermeister demonstrates; dynamic might implement a weird true operator which might cause y to never be initialized. Here’s a minimal repro: class Program { static bool M(out int x) { x = 123; return true; } static … Read more
Disclosure: Harmony is a library that was written and is maintained by me, the author of this post. Harmony 2 is an open source library (MIT license) designed to replace, decorate or modify existing C# methods of any kind during runtime. It main focus is games and plugins written in Mono or .NET. It takes … Read more
Short answer: There is no “compare-not-equal” instruction in IL, so the C# != operator has no exact correspondence and cannot be translated literally. There is however a “compare-equal” instruction (ceq, a direct correspondence to the == operator), so in the general case, x != y gets translated like its slightly longer equivalent (x == y) … Read more
There are a lot of similarities between both implementations (and in my opinion: yes, they’re both “virtual machines”). For one thing, they’re both stack-based VM’s, with no notion of “registers” like we’re used to seeing in a modern CPU like the x86 or PowerPC. The evaluation of all expressions ((1 + 1) / 2) is … Read more
MSIL allows for overloads which differ only in return types because of call void [mscorlib]System.Console::Write(string) or callvirt int32 …
UPDATE: I liked this question so much I made it the subject of my blog on November 18th 2011. Thanks for the great question! I’ve always wondered: what is the purpose of the stack? I assume you mean the evaluation stack of the MSIL language, and not the actual per-thread stack at runtime. Why is … Read more