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In C# 4, the behavior of types without the beforefieldinit flag was changed, so now a type initializer can call before first use of any static field of the class.

My questions are why has the C#/.NET team changed that behavior? What is the main reason? Can you show any practical example where this change makes any sense?

g t
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weqew q
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1 Answers1

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The behaviour has always been within the bounds of what's documented - it's just that it changed from being eager to lazy in .NET 4.

I suspect the JIT team managed to find a way to make it lazy without a performance penalty... or possibly it helps performance somewhere else. This is likely to only be one such change in behaviour within the .NET 4 CLR vs the .NET 2 CLR... it happens that I noticed it, but I doubt that many other people did. I think it's entirely reasonable for the JIT team to adjust things as they see fit, within the documented guarantees.

Ultimately, if this makes your code fail, you've got a bug already.

Jon Skeet
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  • Thank for your answer! Do you know how JIT compiler call type initialazers? Its compiles a method with call of a type initialazer twice or not? I mead that before first call I have a perfomance lack while method executes, but second call of the methods has normal perfomance. – weqew q Jul 18 '11 at 07:57
  • @Smeliy: I don't know, to be honest. I would expect there to be some sort of thunking going on, but I've always left the details to the JIT team :) – Jon Skeet Jul 18 '11 at 07:59