Delegate parameters

Let's say you have two delegates at hand:

delegate void DummyDelegateWithInt(int x);

and

delegate void DummyDelegateWithObject(object x);

Everything seems OK right? But how about the performance issues? that question just crossed my mind. int is a value type where object is a reference type. I just implemented a very simple application that makes method calls through these delegates and passes the parameter 0 (int::zero). Of course these method calls are made more than once, 1,000,000,000 times... here is the result:

Method calls made through the first delegate takes 6.3 - 6.4 seconds (1,000,000,000 times), and the second one takes 32 - 33 seconds in average. Of course you may have a much faster CPU than I have, but it will not change the fact will it?

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2007
  That's right Murat, this is because when you call second delegate dotnet framework have to boxed int parameter, so boxing it's painful for performance. It's simple.

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2007
  In fact this situation occurs in events. The first parameter of the EventHandler delegate is always of type "object" in the framework, and any developer may have as many as possible number of listeners attached to this event.

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2007
  Oh, okay. The context was missing ("The signature of the delegate is determined by some outside entity but I want to pass an int.") As originally written, it appeared to be a comparison between two delegate signatures as in "Look, objects are slower than integers!"

• Anonymous
  August 23, 2007
  First, welcome to blogging space! I was waiting for you.... I think it is fair enough though. .NET should have  all the generic libraries before everyhing else. Thanks to parametric functions anyway :) On the other hand this is the only sample that dynamic languages can do benchmarks...