Recently read in a article on dotnetpearls.com here saying that static ctors take a substantial amount of perfomance hit.
Could not fathom why?
Recently read in a article on dotnetpearls.com here saying that static ctors take a
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Recently read in a article on dotnetpearls.com here saying that static ctors take a substantial amount of perfomance hit.
Could not fathom why?
I think "substantial" is an overstatement in most use cases.
Having a static constructor (even if it does nothing) affects type initialization time due to the presence/absence of the beforefieldinit flag. There are stricter guarantees about timing when you have a static constructor.
For most code, I’d suggest this doesn’t make much difference – but if you’re tight-looping and accessing a static member of a class, it might. Personally I wouldn’t worry about it too much – if you have a suspicion that it’s relevant in your real application, then test it rather than guessing. Microbenchmarks are very likely to exaggerate the effect here.
It’s worth noting that .NET 4 behaves somewhat differently to previous versions when it comes to type initialization – so any benchmarks should really show the different versions in order to be relevant.