Late-bound invocation notes - CallVirt, Delegates, DynamicMethod, InvokeMember.

re: Late-bound invocation notes - CallVirt, Delegates, DynamicMethod, InvokeMember.

Dominic Cooney — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 23:00:00 GMT

Some quick questions:

You mention that using LCG to put arguments on the stack is "orders of magnitude faster"-- can you quantify this? And what about the overhead of the one-off LCG to generate the stub? What do you think the implications of LCG for e.g. JScript or IronPython are?

In theory, can't I define a delegate B Arrow<A,B>(A arg) (and so on for methods with more arguments) and get better typing to boot? What is the relative efficiency of this? And will the BCL have built-in Arrow<A,B> and Tuple<...> types?

Lastly, a couple of general LCG questions: Can I use LCG e.g. to emit wrappers that do security assertions or something like that? And how does LCG work in long-running processes, or where you use LCG a lot-- is LCG-generated code GCed?

New and Notable 41

Sam Gentile's Blog — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 15:52:00 GMT

New and Notable 41

Sam Gentile's Blog — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 15:52:00 GMT

And I'd like to thank Joel...

Dominic Cooney's Weblog — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 14:54:00 GMT

Joel's Lightweight Code Gen spells SUWEET for small scripting languages in games.

Justin Rogers, DigiTec Web Consultants, LLC. — Sat, 10 Apr 2004 21:46:00 GMT

Exploring Late-Bound Invocation

Cook Computing — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 20:51:00 GMT

I recently mentioned Joel Pobar's posting on Late-Bound Invocation and over the weekend I did some investigation into what the performance is like for the various methods he describes. The spur for this was reading about the JVM-based scripting language...

Eric Gunnerson's article

Dumky — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 21:51:00 GMT

Eric Gunnerson has an article on MSDN comparing the perf for these different approaches, and what Whidbey should improve:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dncscol/html/csharp02172004.asp

re: Late-bound invocation notes - CallVirt, Delegates, DynamicMethod, InvokeMember.

Joel Pobar — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 22:33:00 GMT

Firstly, thanks to Charles for the performance numbers. I hadn't had a chance to get to them myself. The delegate and DynamicMethod PDC bits will be slightly less performant than the next community drop, so expect the numbers to change a little. There's also mention of the cost of generating the DynamicMethod - yes, absolutely, there's a working set hit with the introduction of the JIT.

Secondly, I also need to clean up the example a little more. I tried to blend both performance and type checking aspects in to the example, but it ended up just looking kludgy, as you can see.

Thirdly, there's a bunch of things I didn't explain. I should really go away and cook up another blog post, but I'll dump here for now. Clearly, the scenario is what drives the choice in invocation path. In this particular case, having full knowledge of the receiver gave us a clear performance win. Unfortunately, as with most common dynamic scenario's, you never generally have full knowledge of anything. With this statement, comes a whole load of baggage. Signature checks, type checks, receiver checks - sounds a little like what Invoke member is for doesn't it?

There's a whole range of scenario's I haven't touched on here, some include:
- You know the signature of the method to invoke, but you don't know the name or the receiver.
- You know the signature and the name, but not the receiver
- You know the name, but not the signature
Perhaps my next blog post will touch on these - seems like I've opened a can of worms so it might just be worthwhile.

Lastly, Dominic had a question about LCG in long-running processes. The long and the short of it is, LCG is GC'ed, there's the reclaimation story. So definitely think about holding on to that handle if you care about throughput.

That's enough dumping for now. Leave me a comment if you'd like a blog story for all this. =)

More late-bound invocation scenario notes

Joel Pobar's weblog — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 23:47:00 GMT

Improvements to System.Reflection in VS2005

Something Clever — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 20:19:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2005 will contain some exciting enhancements to the System.Reflection namespace.

What's new in System.Reflection (and friends)

Joel Pobar's weblog — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 08:21:00 GMT

System.Reflection in Whidbey

Mike Taulty's Weblog — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 18:22:00 GMT

What's new in System.Reflection (and friends)

Joel Pobar's weblog — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 20:37:00 GMT

I know the token but...calli & newobj

Alan Cyment — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 13:49:00 GMT

What about building a special purpose "dynamic calling assembly" with an only class/method, programmed in plain IL, that takes a RuntimeMethodHandle instance and an Object[] as parameters, does the stack pushing and finally invokes via "calli"? I'm planning to take this road in my dynamic invocation scenario (I know the method token when trying to do the calling), but, as far as I have read, there's no way to do an "indirect newobj" constructor call. Isn't there an equivalente to calli that allocates memory for a new object? not even in Whidbey?

TIA,
Alan

Lightweight Code Generation

菊池 Blog — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 01:28:00 GMT

Lightweight Code Generation

CLR Dynamic languages under the hood (Part 1 of many)

Joel Pobar's CLR weblog — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 21:44:05 GMT

There seems to be a fair amount of recent press and blog action surrounding the dynamic or “scripting”...

CLR Dynamic languages under the hood (Part 1 of many)

Joel Pobar's CLR weblog — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 21:48:09 GMT

There seems to be a fair amount of recent press and blog action surrounding the dynamic or “scripting”...

Activator.CreateInstance and beyond

Haibo Luo's weblog — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 04:45:53 GMT

Q: Assume we have 2000 unknown types; (however) we know each type has a constructor
...

DebuggerVisualizer for DynamicMethod (Show me the IL)

Haibo Luo's weblog — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 21:59:17 GMT

Have you ever tried DynamicMethod, one of the coolest features in the .NET 2.0? Hope you have; otherwise,

How Silverlight supports dynamic languages

Christian Weyer: Smells like service spirit — Tue, 01 May 2007 23:17:45 GMT

I am not at this conference, but anyway...What I was wondering is how Silverlight does support these...

Joel Pobar s CLR weblog Late bound invocation notes CallVirt | Cast Iron Cookware

Tue, 26 May 2009 21:30:13 GMT

PingBack from http://castironbakeware.info/story.php?title=joel-pobar-s-clr-weblog-late-bound-invocation-notes-callvirt

Joel Pobar s CLR weblog Late bound invocation notes CallVirt | Indoor Grills

Joel Pobar s CLR weblog Late bound invocation notes CallVirt | Indoor Grills — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:56:28 GMT

PingBack from http://indoorgrillsrecipes.info/story.php?id=2362

Joel Pobar s CLR weblog Late bound invocation notes CallVirt | Insomnia Cure

Joel Pobar s CLR weblog Late bound invocation notes CallVirt | Insomnia Cure — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:16:59 GMT

PingBack from http://insomniacuresite.info/story.php?id=8012