[Mono-dev] corcompare - refactored to use Mono.Cecil instead of reflection

[atsushi eno]

Hello,

I'm not a maintainer of corcompare (especially considering that I
don't touch the class status pages), but anyways - adding further
dependency on prebuilt managed assembly does not sound a good idea
to me especially when it becomes part of the build.

I think you could keep this one as a different tool, probably
outside mcs tree. We haven't touched corcompare stuff very frequently,
so having two sources won't be so messy. (I have similar tree in
olive, but almost no problem).

Atsushi Eno


2006-12-20 (水) の 23:49 -0800 に Moty Mondiano さんは書きました:
> Attached is a refactoring of corcompare to use Mono.Cecil.
> 
>  
> 
> We have tried to use corcompare on our mscorlib.dll (customized for
> Grasshopper and for running on Java). We tried running corcompare
> using Mono and also using MS .Net.
> 
> Because corcompare uses Reflection it refused to load our version of
> mscorlib.dll – enums and structs conflicted with the built in enums
> and structs. We believe that it will refuse to load a version of
> mscorlib other then the one it is running on.
> 
> We therefore chose to use Mono.Cecil instead of Reflection. The choice
> of Mono.Cecil is a natural choice in this context as it can load and
> analyze any assembly without side effects like the ones we saw.
> 
>  
> 
> As a result Corcompare is now:
> 
> 1.       Much faster (more likely to be used in the build system)
> 
> 2.       Can be used to load any version of mscorlib.
> 
> 3.       Does not run any static initializers 
> 
>  
> 
> Open Issue 1: Comparison of attribute values is now less accurate.
> Using Mono.Cecil we cannot evaluate the attribute but only examine how
> it was initialized. Therefore the following will be diagnosed as a
> difference:
> 
>             [MyAttribute(“Value”)] vs.
> 
>             [MyAttribute(MyProerty = “Value”)]
> 
>  
> 
> Open Issue 2: How to resolve the build dependency on Mono.Cecil. Since
> now Corcompare uses Mono.Cecil.dll, I temporally added this compiler
> argument "-r:Mono.Cecil.dll" (i.e. it expects to find Mono.Cecil.dll
> in the current directory). Please advise on best practice to solve
> this dependency (for example should this makefile build
> Mono.Cecil.dll ?)
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Moty Mondiano
> 
> Mainsoft Corporation