Question

A friend of mine came across the interesting source code of the two methods in String.cs:

[TargetedPatchingOptOut("Performance critical to inline across NGen image boundaries")]
public static bool operator ==(string a, string b)
{
    return Equals(a, b); 
}

[TargetedPatchingOptOut("Performance critical to inline across NGen image boundaries")]
public static bool Equals(string a, string b)
{
    return ((a == b) || (((a != null) && (b != null)) && EqualsHelper(a, b)));
}

Why doesn’t it result in an endless loop? (and all our programs will be terminated by a StackOverflowException!)

Answer 1

Apparently so, at least according to the accepted answer.

(I can’t leave a comment until I have a certain amount of rep. Hooray SO.)