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Showing posts from February, 2009

Sasa Reborn!

My .NET Sasa library has fallen by the wayside as I experimented with translating various functional idioms in my FP# library. Reading up on what a few other generic class libraries have been experimenting with, like Mono Rocks, spurred me to putting those experiments to use and updating Sasa. I significantly simplified a lot of the code, documented every class and method, and generalized as much as possible. The license is LGPL v2, and you can download the source via svn: svn co https://sasa.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/sasa/tags/v0.8 sasa Sasa Core v0.8 A set of useful extensions to core System classes and some useful classes for high assurance development. Named tuple types: Pair, Triple, Quad. Either types, representing one of many possible values. There are Either types for 2, 3, and 4 parameters, mimicking the Pair, Triple, and Quad structure. Tuples are "product" types, while Either is a "sum" type, and products and sums are duals. Since products are useful,

The cost of type tests and casts in C#

Awhile back I ran some tests comparing the dispatching performance of runtime tests+casts against double dispatch . Turned out runtime type tests and casting were noticeably faster than dispatching, probably because they avoid more pipeline stalls. Unfortunately, there is a "common wisdom" in the .NET world that an "is" test followed by an "as" cast is performing two casts, and in fact one should simply perform the "as" cast then check the result against null: // prefer this form string a = o as string; if (a != null) { Console.WriteLine(a); } // to this form: if (o is string) { string a = o as string; Console.WriteLine(a); } In fact, that's not the case, as any compiler worth its salt will coalesce the two tests into a single cast and branch operation. I took the tests from the above dispatching and altered them to perform the cast-and-null check, then I ran the tests again with the original is-then-as form. The latter form was about