[Mono-dev] [PATCH] Optimization to System.Collections.Generic.List

[Ben Maurer]

On Sat, 2005-11-12 at 19:13 +0100, Laurent Debacker wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> The file is a modified version of
> mcs/class/corlib/System.Collections.Generic/List.cs revision 52947.
> 
> I've modified the ForEach method so that it no longer uses the
> enumerator. This avoids a lot of method calls to Enumerator (and the
> creation of yet another Enumerator object).

The Enumerator is a struct, it is allocated on the stack. So, your patch
just inlines the methods. With our current jit, this is probably faster,
first we aren't doing inlining, second even if we did inline, the struct
would always be on the stack, with int variables, we can keep it in a
register. We'd need something to decompose the struct into variables so
that we could do register allocation on it. I'd rather focus on making
foreach () on a List<T> be nearly as fast as manual iteration than
replacing things with manual loops blindly.

However, it looks like that is besides the point. MSFT does not do
failfast behavior (ie, it doesn't error out on modifications to the
list), as you commented in the method. I believe this is a bug (we
should file it with them), because modifying the collection will make
the enumeration meaningless. However, we should emulate the behavior for
now.

Please rewrite using a for loop rather than a while loop and submit a
patch (svn diff).

-- Ben