C# Language Design Notes for Feb 7, 2018

Warning: These are raw notes, and still need to be cleaned up. Read at your own peril!

Tuple equality

We want to make it so that the == operator is delegated to the elements, but the choice of & operator shouldn't be up to the elements.

We can't think of this in terms of a user-defined == on the ValueTuple<...> overloads, since those don't have access to the specific == implementations of the type arguments.

1. Same as (tempA == tempC) && (tempB == tempD), taking whatever & operator eventually gets used.
2. Same as (bool)(tempA == tempC) && (bool)(tempB == tempD) but only when there is an implicit conversion to bool 2a. Same as 2 or !(tempA == tempC).false && !(tempB == tempD).false, so there are two ways to make the individual comparisons bool

We want to do 2a, so that we make every effort to turn the result of each comparison into bool. For == we would use the false operator, for != we will use the true operator. But the & and | are applied to booleans.

For dynamic, let's look at what if does and probably do the same.

The fixed statement

We're adding support for a type to have a special method that returns a pinned ref.

Copy?

Should that special method be executed on a copy or on an original l-value? We don't see good reasons to.

• The method might want to change the state for the benefit of a future fixed or otherwise
• Wasteful to copy big struct

Generics

We need to know if it's a struct or a class, to decide whether to copy (for the null check) or not (to preserve mutations in a struct).

We already solved this for ?.. We can emit a check for whether the type is a reference type (check whether its default is null), and the JIT specializes.

Nullable

No lifting. You can do your own if you really want, but there is no way (for the compiler or user) to expose the value itself without copying. If you want to pin an specific nullable type you can, as long as an extension method is provided for it.

Ref extension methods

Allow? Yes, same as for ref extension methods in general: Has to be called on a mutable l-value. For in, anything is fine.

Name of method

GetPinnableReference is weird enough; we don't have to put "Dangerous" or something in the name.