Question

I was using Reflector to look at the implementation of String.Format and had always been under the impression that the overloads of String.Format that took 1, 2 & 3 arguments were optimized versions of the method that takes an object array. However, what I found was that internally they create an object array and then call a method that takes an object array.

1 arg

public static string Format(string format, object arg0)
{
    if (format == null)
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException("format");
    }
    return Format(null, format, new object[] { arg0 });
}

2 args

public static string Format(string format, object arg0, object arg1)
{
    if (format == null)
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException("format");
    }
    return Format(null, format, new object[] { arg0, arg1 });
}

3 args

public static string Format(string format, object arg0, object arg1, object arg2)
{
    if (format == null)
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException("format");
    }
    return Format(null, format, new object[] { arg0, arg1, arg2 });
}

Object array

public static string Format(string format, params object[] args)
{
    if ((format == null) || (args == null))
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException((format == null) ? "format" : "args");
    }
    return Format(null, format, args);
}

Internally they all end up using the same code and so using the 1, 2 & 3 argument versions are no faster than the object array version.

So my question is – why do they exist?

When you use the object array version with a comma separated list of values, the compiler automatically converts the arguments into an object array because of the params/ParamArray keyword which is essentially what the 1, 2 & 3 versions do, so they seem redundant. Why did the BCL designers add these overloads?

Answer 1

One reason, as Hans mentions, is that creating an array is a lot of unnecessary overhead in most common cases of formatting a string. This saves space in the EXE.

Another reason is that not all languages support variadic functions (use of params in C#). This allows users of those languages to avoid array creation for the most common cases of string formatting. This saves a lot for languages that don’t have simple syntax for array creation and initialization.