Check if null before set to null?

Question

Should we check if variable is null before setting it to null?

if (MyBills != null) 
{
    MyBills = null;
}

For, example, in a Java related question the performance implications are minimal. Is this the case in C#? Other implications?

Testing

I've created the following code to test:

var watch = System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch.StartNew();

int iterations = int.MaxValue;
List<int> myBills= null;
for (var i = 0; i < iterations; i++)
{
    if (myBills!= null)
    {
        myBills = null;
    }
}
watch.Stop();
var elapsedMs = watch.ElapsedMilliseconds;
Console.WriteLine(elapsedMs);

Running it on rextester with and without the if (myList != null) the results are as following:

With check      Without check
988             941
938             1021
953             987
998             973
1004            1031

Average 
976.2           990.6

So, even testing it in a non-controlled environment, the performance implications are irrelevant.

Answer 1

No, there is not much use. Probably checking the variable being null or not is just as expensive as setting it to null one time too many.

If it was a property, with additional logic behind it, it could make sense to test it before, but that should actually be the responsibility of the logic in the property, not your code.

Answer 2

Aside from the property/setter argument I can't see any logical reason for this in the code you have provided.

However, if you want to perform extra operations on the object before setting it to null it makes sense:

if (MyBills != null)
{
     MyBills.Dispose();
     MyBills = null;
}

Or perform some other operation like logging a result.

But these two examples are both outside of the example code you have provided.

---

Because people seem to be questioning the use case for my first example, here's one. This will prevent multiple calls to Dispose causing an ObjectDisposedException.

public class MyClass : IDisposable
{
    private SomeDisposableObject _disposableObject;

    //Some code

    public void Dispose()
    {
        if (_disposableObject != null)
        {
            _disposableObject.Dispose();
            _disposableObject = null;
        }
    }
}

---

I have performed some timings and found the following results:

valueClass with null check = 1361
nullClass with null check = 1173
valueClass with no null check = 1208
nullClass with no null check = 1148

As you can see without the null check it is slightly quicker but not enough for any significant optimisation. Also I performed these timings from the compiler in debug mode with optimisations turned off so they are not 100% accurate/relevant.

However, when I ran in release mode, with optimisations enabled outside of the compiler the results were so close together it was even more negligible to check or not.

And the test code:

using System;

namespace NullCheckTest
{
    class Program
    {
        const int iterations = 10000000;

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            MyClass valueClass = new MyClass() { Value = 10 };
            MyClass nullClass = null;

            Console.WriteLine($"valueClass with null check = {TestNullCheck(valueClass)}");
            Console.WriteLine($"nullClass with null check = {TestNullCheck(nullClass)}");

            Console.WriteLine($"valueClass with no null check = {TestNoNullCheck(valueClass)}");
            Console.WriteLine($"nullClass with no null check = {TestNoNullCheck(nullClass)}");

            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        static long TestNullCheck(MyClass myClass)
        {
            MyClass initial = myClass;

            System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch sw = new System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch();
            for (int i = 0; i < iterations; ++i)
            {
                sw.Start();

                if (myClass != null)
                {
                    myClass = null;
                }

                sw.Stop();

                myClass = initial;
            }

            return sw.ElapsedMilliseconds;
        }

        static long TestNoNullCheck(MyClass myClass)
        {
            MyClass initial = myClass;

            System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch sw = new System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch();
            for (int i = 0; i < iterations; ++i)
            {
                sw.Start();

                myClass = null;

                sw.Stop();

                myClass = initial;
            }

            return sw.ElapsedMilliseconds;
        }
    }

    public class MyClass
    {
        public int Value { get; set; }
    }
}

Answer 3

To answer the question: No, there is no need.

However. As a general rule of thumb object variables and properties should never be null, as it forces you to always have to check the code if the value is being set somewhere.

What you're supposed to do, is use a custom class Maybe<> to indicate that an object variable or property might not be initialized.

Like so:

public class Maybe<T> where T : class
{
    public readonly T Value { get; }

    public Maybe(T value)
    {
        _Value = value;
    }

    public bool HasValue => _Value != null;
    public bool HasNoValue => _Value == null;

    public static operation Maybe<T>(T value) => new Maybe(value);
}

Then you can use it thus:

public class Foo
{
    public Maybe<Bar> Bar { get; set; }
    public int GetBarCount()
    {
        return Bar.HasValue ? Bar.Count : 0;
    }
}

public class Bar
{
    public int Count { get; set; }
}

The above code will work in all of the following examples:

Foo foo = new Foo();
foo.Bar = new Bar(); // Outputs 0 when GetBarCount is called
foo.Bar = new Bar { Count = 2 }; // Outputs 2 when GetBarCount is called
foo.Bar = new Maybe<Bar>(new Bar()); // Outputs 0 when GetBarCount is called
foo.Bar = new Maybe<Bar>(new Bar { Count = 2 }); // Outputs 2 when GetBarCount is called
foo.Bar = new Maybe<Bar>(null); // Outputs 0 when GetBarCount is called
foo.Bar = null;  // Outputs 0 when GetBarCount is called

Note! - When using Maybe<Bar> you explicitly mark Foo.Bar as not always having a value, and provides a strong signal of it. Not marking it with Maybe<Bar>, however, signals that it will always have a value. By using the Maybe<> wrapper in the right places, the code becomes much easier to work with, as you no longer have to do null checks for unwrapped object variables and properties.