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On CIL and coding

Is it bad that whenever I code C# I can see exactly the IL that will be produced? Should I start developing with ilasm? Hmm…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 2:44 pm and is filed under C#. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

10 Responses to “On CIL and coding”

  1. Jay Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 3:08 pm

    It’s not bad. Maybe a bit unusual, but not bad.

    I would enjoy seeing a small app written directly in IL. Might make a good intro-to-IL article.

    Can you send me your email address?

  2. AndersH Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 3:36 pm

    Nah, but if you start seeing jit’ed code, especially heavily optimized jit’ed code, you might want to take a small break.

    It’s bad if you actually think your c# code is easier to read, if you indent it according to what the stack depth will be at that point of the execution.

  3. Bill Barry Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 3:38 pm

    It only becomes bad when you begin avoiding certain constructs because they produce CIL opcodes that you don’t “like”. For instance preferring an infinite while loop with a break instead of a for loop.

  4. Chris Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 3:56 pm

    @Bill:

    I do prefer > over >= (ditto for < ) because of the IL sequences. :)

    (a > b): a; b; cgt;

    (a >= b): a; b; clt; ldc.i4.0; ceq;

    For floating-point expressions there isn’t much of a choice, but for integers (a > 0) will produce more efficient IL than (a >= 1).

  5. edison Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 6:42 pm

    Is someone in Mono Team working in a obfuscater?

  6. Gabriel Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    @Chris:

    I’m surprised the compiler doesn’t take care of that, at least for comparisons with constants.

  7. Chris Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 11:37 pm

    @edison: Not to my knowledge.

    @Gabriel: Yes, you would think, but mcs does not.

  8. RichB Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 4:28 am

    Even when you’re coding anonymous methods/lambdas and iterators? That would be an impressive skill.

  9. Foxfire Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 10:30 am

    @Gabriel

    The general idea in CLI is that the individual language compilers shouldn’t optimize much because the JIT-Compiler does the optimizations.

  10. Chris Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 2:07 pm

    @RichB: When coding anonymous delegates, yes I can. I have coded iterators (I assume you are talking about yield return) but not enough to know the CIL generated there. As for lambdas, I haven’t used that feature at all.

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