Re: [DotGNU]fxcop

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Friday 30 April 2004 10:59 pm, Miroslaw Dobrzanski-Neumann wrote:

> thus a == string.Empty is not an option
> how about this replacement:
>
> if (a != null && a.Length == 0)

This will be relatively efficient when compiled with "cscc", but other C# 
compilers will generate bad code for this too as they will call an overloaded 
operator to do the initial null check.  You'd gain nothing over the original 
'if (a == "")'.  To be *really* efficient, you have to do the following:

    if (((Object)a) != null && a.Length == 0)

This avoids the overloaded operator, but now it is getting messy.  It is worth 
asking whether you are making the code unreadable for the sake of 
performance.  Perhaps it would be better to change the order of the 
surrounding algorithm so that you are doing less string comparisons in the 
first place?

Was there a particular place in the code where you noticed this type of check 
causing performance problems?  All systems spend 80% of their time in 20% of 
the code, so if the string checks aren't in that 20%, then there's no point 
making the comparison code messy.

Just because a lint program says something is bad doesn't mean that it is 
always bad.

Cheers,

Rhys.