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Extending the async methods in C#

January 11, 2018 Jan 11, 2018 01/11/18
Sergey Tepliakov
The async series Dissecting the async methods in C#. Extending the async methods in C#. The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#. One user scenario to rule them all. In the previous blog post we discussed how the C# compiler transforms asynchronous methods. In this post, we'll focus on extensibility points ...

Dissecting the async methods in C#

November 30, 2017 Nov 30, 2017 11/30/17
Sergey Tepliakov
The async series Dissecting the async methods in C#. Extending the async methods in C#. The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#. One user scenario to rule them all. The C# language is great for developer's productivity and I'm glad for the recent push towards making it more suitable for high-performance ...

Dissecting the tuples in C# 7

November 1, 2017 Nov 1, 2017 11/1/17
Sergey Tepliakov
System.Tuple types were introduced in .NET 4.0 with two significant drawbacks: (1) tuple types are classes and (2) there was no language support for constructing/deconstructing them. To solve these issues, C# 7 introduces new language feature as well as a new family of types (*). Today, if you need to glue together two values to return them...

Dissecting the pattern matching in C# 7

October 16, 2017 Oct 16, 2017 10/16/17
Sergey Tepliakov
C# 7 finally introduced a long-awaited feature called "pattern matching". If you're familiar with functional languages like F# you may be slightly disappointed with this feature in its current state, but even today it can simplify your code in a variety of different scenarios. Every new feature is fraught with danger for a developer working...

Dissecting the local functions in C# 7

October 3, 2017 Oct 3, 2017 10/3/17
Sergey Tepliakov
The Local functions is a new feature in C# 7 that allows defining a function inside another function. When to use a local function? The main idea of local functions is very similar to anonymous methods: in some cases creating a named function is too expensive in terms of cognitive load on a reader. Sometimes the functionality is inherently ...

Managed object internals, Part 4. Fields layout

September 21, 2017 Sep 21, 2017 09/21/17
Sergey Tepliakov
In the recent blog posts we've discussed invisible part of the object layout in the CLR: Managed object internals, Part 1. The Layout Managed object internals, Part 2. Object header layout and the cost of locking Managed object internals, Part 3. The layout of a managed array This time we're going to focus on the layout of an ...

Managed object internals, Part 3. The layout of a managed array

September 12, 2017 Sep 12, 2017 09/12/17
Sergey Tepliakov
Arrays are one of the basic building blocks of every applications. Even if you do not use arrays directly every day you definitely use them indirectly as part of almost any library. C# has arrays from the very beginning and back in the day that was the only "generic"-like and type safe data structure available. Today you may use them less ...

Managed object internals, Part 1. The layout

May 26, 2017 May 26, 2017 05/26/17
Sergey Tepliakov
The layout of a managed object is pretty simple: a managed object contains instance data, a pointer to a meta-data (a.k.a. method table pointer) and a bag of internal information also known as an object header. The first time I’ve read about it, I’ve got a question: why the layout of an object is so weird? Why a managed reference ...

To box or not to Box? That is the question!

May 17, 2017 May 17, 2017 05/17/17
Sergey Tepliakov
Discussions on reddit, hacker news. Recently I've noticed that the Equal method from our ValueTuple (*) struct generates significant memory traffic (~1Gb). That was a bit of a surprise to me. This struct is well designed and was used pretty heavily in many performance critical scenarios. Here how the struct looks like: public struct ...