Background

I’ve recently been doing some optimisation work which has proved quite interesting in terms of working with reflection. My efforts porting Google’s Protocol Buffers are now pretty complete in terms of functionality, so I’ve been looking at improving the performance. The basic idea is that you specify your data types in a .proto file, and then generate C# from that. The generated C# allows you to manipulate the data, and serialize/deserialize it. When you generate the code, it can be optimised either for size or speed. The “small” code can end up being much smaller than the “fast” code – but it’s also significantly slower as it uses reflection when serializing and deserializing. My first rough-and-ready benchmark results (using a 130K data file based on Northwind) were slightly terrifying:

Operation	Time (ms)
Deserialize (fast)	5.18
Serialize (fast)	3.96
Deserialize (slow)	429.49
Serialize (slow)	103.67

Far from all of this difference was due to reflection, but it was a significant chunk – and provided the most interesting and challenging optimisation. This post doesn’t show the actual Protocol Buffer code, but demonstrates the three steps I required to radically improve the performance of reflection. The examples I’ve used are chosen just for simplicity.

Converting MethodInfo into a delegate instance

There are lots of things you can do with reflection, obviously – but I’m primarily interested in calling methods, using the associated MethodInfo. This includes setting properties, using the results of the GetGetMethod and GetSetMethod methods of PropertyInfo. We’ll use String.IndexOf(char) as our initial example.

Normally when you’re calling methods with reflection, you call MethodInfo.Invoke. Unfortunately, this proves to be quite slow. If you know the signature of the method at compile-time, you can convert the method into a delegate with that signature using Delegate.CreateDelegate(Type, object, MethodInfo). You simply pass in the delegate type you want to create an instance of, the target of the call (i.e. what the method will be called
on), and the method you want to call. It would be nice if there were a generic version of this call to avoid casting the result, but never mind. Here’s a complete example demonstrating how it works:

using System;
using System.Reflection;
public class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        MethodInfo method = typeof(string).GetMethod("IndexOf", new Type[] { typeof(char) });

        Func<char, int> converted = (Func<char, int>)
            Delegate.CreateDelegate(typeof(Func<char, int>), "Hello", method);

        Console.WriteLine(converted('l'));
        Console.WriteLine(converted('o'));
        Console.WriteLine(converted('x'));
    }
}

This prints out 2, 4, and -1; exactly what we’d get if we’d called "Hello".IndexOf(...) directly. Now let’s see what the speed differences are…

We’re mostly interested in the time taken to go from the main calling code to the method being called, whether that’s with a direct method call, MethodInfo.Invoke or the delegate. To make IndexOf itself take as little time as possible, I tested it by passing in ‘H’ so it would return 0 immediately. As normal, the test was rough and ready, but here are the results:

Invocation type	Stopwatch ticks per invocation
Direct	0.18
Reflection	120
Delegate	0.20

One important point is that I created a new parameter array for each invocation of the MethodInfo – obviously this is slightly costly in itself, but it mirrors real world usage. The exact numbers don’t matter, but the relative sizes are the important point: using a delegate invocation is only about 10% slower than direct invocation, whereas using reflection takes over 600 times as long. Of course these figures will depend on the method being called – if the direct invocation can be inlined, I’d expect that to make a significant difference in some cases. However, the benefit in converting reflection calls into delegate calls is obvious.

Now, what about if we wanted to vary the string we were calling IndexOf on?

Interlude: open and closed delegates

When you create a delegate directly in C# using a method group conversion, you (almost) always create an open delegate for static methods and a closed delegate for instance methods. To explain the difference between open and closed delegates, it’s best to start thinking of all methods as being static – but with instance methods having an extra parameter at the start to represent this. In fact, extension methods use exactly this model. Reality is more complicated than that due to polymorphism, but we’ll leave that to one side for the moment.

Going back to our String.IndexOf example, we can start thinking of the signature as being:

static int IndexOf(string target, char c)

At this point it’s easy to explain the difference between open and closed delegates: a closed delegate has a value which it implicitly passes in as the first argument, whereas with an open delegate you specify all the arguments when you invoke the delegate. The implicit first argument is represented by the Delegate.Target property. It’s null for open delegates – which is usually the case when you create a delegate directly in C#. Here’s a short program to demonstrate the difference when you create delegate instances using C# directly:

using System;
public class Test
{
    readonly string name;

    public Test(string name)
    {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public void Display()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Test; name = {0}", name);
    }

    static void StaticMethod()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Static method");
    }

    static void Main()
    {
        Test foo = new Test("foo");

        Action closed = foo.Display; // closed.Target == foo
        Action open = StaticMethod;  // open.Target == null

        closed();
        open();
    }
}

Before we go back to reflection, I’ll clarify the “almost” I used earlier on. You can’t currently create an open delegate referring to an instance method in C# using method group conversions – but you can create a closed delegate referring to a static method, if it’s an extension method. This makes sense, as extension methods are a strange sort of half-way house between static methods and instance methods – they’re truly static methods which can be used as if they were instance methods. I’ve got an example on my C# in Depth site.

Creating open delegates with reflection

Even though C# doesn’t support all the possible combinations of static/instance methods and open/closed delegates directly, Delegate.CreateDelegate has overloads to let you do just that. The signature we used earlier (with parameters Type, object, MethodInfo) always creates a closed delegate. There’s another overload without the middle parameter – and that always creates an open delegate. We can easily modify our earlier example to let us call String.IndexOf(char) varying both the needle and the haystack, so to speak:

using System;
using System.Reflection;
public class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        MethodInfo method = typeof(string).GetMethod("IndexOf", new Type[] { typeof(char) });

        Func<string, char, int> converted = (Func<string, char, int>)
            Delegate.CreateDelegate(typeof(Func<string, char, int>), method);

        Console.WriteLine(converted("Hello", 'l'));
        Console.WriteLine(converted("Jon", 'o'));
        Console.WriteLine(converted("Hello", 'n'));
    }
}

This prints 2, 1, -1, as if we’d called "Hello".IndexOf('l'), "Jon".IndexOf('o') and "Hello".IndexOf('n').

This can be a very powerful tool – in particular it’s crucial for my Protocol Buffers port: for a particular type, I can create a delegate which will set a property. I can keep that information around forever, and use the same delegate to set the property to different values on different instances of the type.

There’s just one more problem to overcome – and unfortunately this is where things get a little weird.

Adapting delegates for parameter and return types

Due to the way that the Protocol Buffer library works, I often need to call methods or set properties without knowing at compile-time what the parameter types are, or indeed the return type of the method. I can be confident that I’ll always call it with appropriate parameters, but I just don’t know what they’ll be ahead of time. Things are slightly better in terms of the type declaring the method – I know that at compile-time, although only as a generic type parameter. What I do know with confidence is the number of parameters (I’ll just specify a single parameter for our example), and whether or not the method will return a value (we’ll use an example which always returns a parameter).

What I need is a generic method which has a type parameter T representing the type which implements the method, and which returns a Func – a delegate instance which lets me pass the target and the argument value, and which will call the method and then return the value in a weakly typed manner. So we’d like this kind of program to work:

using System;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Text;
public class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        MethodInfo indexOf = typeof(string).GetMethod("IndexOf", new Type[] { typeof(char) });
        MethodInfo getByteCount = typeof(Encoding).GetMethod("GetByteCount", new Type[] { typeof(string) });

        Func<string, object, object> indexOfFunc = MagicMethod<string>(indexOf);
        Func<Encoding, object, object> getByteCountFunc = MagicMethod<Encoding>(getByteCount);

        Console.WriteLine(indexOfFunc("Hello", 'e'));
        Console.WriteLine(getByteCountFunc(Encoding.UTF8, "Euro sign: \u20ac"));
    }

    static Func<T, object, object> MagicMethod<T>(MethodInfo method)
    {
        // TODO: Implement this method!
        throw new NotImplementedException();
    }
}

Note: I was going to demonstrate this by calling DateTime.AddDays, but for value type instance methods the implicit first first parameter is passed by reference, so we’d need a delegate type with a signature of DateTime Foo(ref DateTime original, double days) to call CreateDelegate. It’s feasible, but a bit of a faff. In particular, you can’t use Func as that doesn’t have any
by-reference parameters.

Make sure you understand what we’re aiming for here. Notice that we’re not really type-safe – just like we wouldn’t be if we were calling MethodInfo.Invoke. Of course we’d normally want type safety, but in this case it would make the calling code much more complicated, and in some places it might effectively be impossible. So, with the goal in place, we know we need to implement MagicMethod. (It’s not called MagicMethod in the real source code, of course – but frankly it’s quite a tricky method to name sensibly, and at this stage it really does feel like magic.)

The first obvious attempt at implementing MagicMethod would be to use CreateDelegate as we’ve done before, like this:

// Warning: doesn't actually work!
static Func<T, object, object> MagicMethod<T>(MethodInfo method)
{
    return (Func<T, object, object>)
        Delegate.CreateDelegate(typeof(Func<T, object, object>), method);
}

Unfortunately, that fails – the call to CreateDelegate fails with an ArgumentException because the delegate type isn’t right for the method that we’re trying to call. The delegate types don’t have to be exactly right, just compatible (as of .NET 2.0) – but we need an explicit conversion from object to the right parameter type, and a potentially boxing conversion of the return value. We still want to call CreateDelegate though… so somewhere we’re going to have to create a Func where TTarget is a type parameter representing the type of object we’re going to call the method on, TParam is the type of the single parameter the method accepts, and TReturn is the return type of the method.

We could do that directly with reflection, using typeof(Func) to get the open type (not to be confused with an open delegate!), then calling Type.MakeGenericType to create the right constructed type. We’ll need to do something like that anyway, but it’s actually easier to write another generic method with the right type parameters for this part. That will let us convert the MethodInfo into a delegate, but then what are we going to do with it? How can we convert a Func into a Func? Well, we need to cast the parameter from object to TParam, and then convert the result from TReturn to object, which may involve boxing. If we were writing a method to do this, it would look something like this:

static object CallAndConvert<TTarget, TParam, TReturn>
    (Func<TTarget, TParam, TReturn> func, TTarget target, object param)
{
    // Conversion from TReturn to object is implicit
    return func(target, (TParam) param);
}

We don’t want to execute that code at the moment – we want to create a delegate which will execute it later. The easiest way to do that is to move the code into a lambda expression within a normal method which already has a reference to the Func. That lambda expression will then be converted into a delegate of the type we really want. It may feel like we’re just adding layer upon layer of indirection (and indeed we are) but we’re genuinely making progress. Honest. Here’s the new generic method:

static Func<TTarget, object, object> MagicMethodHelper<TTarget, TParam, TReturn>(MethodInfo method)
{
    // Convert the slow MethodInfo into a fast, strongly typed, open delegate
    Func<TTarget, TParam, TReturn> func = (Func<TTarget, TParam, TReturn>)
        Delegate.CreateDelegate(typeof(Func<TTarget, TParam, TReturn>), method);
    // Now create a more weakly typed delegate which will call the strongly typed one
    Func<TTarget, object, object> ret = (TTarget target, object param) => func(target, (TParam) param);
    return ret;
}

(We could return the lambda expression directly – the ret variable is only present as an attempt to add some clarity.)

We’re now just one step away from having a working program – we need to implement MagicMethod by calling MagicMethodHelper. There’s one obvious problem though – we need three type arguments to call MagicMethodHelper, and we’ve only got one of them in MagicMethod. We know the other two at execution time, based on the parameter type and return type of the MethodInfo we’ve been
passed. The fact that we only know them at execution time suggests the next step – we need to use reflection to invoke MagicMethodHelper. We need to fetch the generic method and then supply the type arguments. It’s easier to show this than to describe it:

static Func<T, object, object> MagicMethod<T>(MethodInfo method) where T : class
{
    // First fetch the generic form
    MethodInfo genericHelper = typeof(Test).GetMethod(
        "MagicMethodHelper", BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.NonPublic);
    // Now supply the type arguments
    MethodInfo constructedHelper = genericHelper.MakeGenericMethod(
        typeof(T), method.GetParameters()[0].ParameterType, method.ReturnType);

    // Now call it. The null argument is because it’s a static method.
    object ret = constructedHelper.Invoke(null, new object[] { method });

    // Cast the result to the right kind of delegate and return it
    return (Func<T, object, object>) ret;
}

I’ve added the where T : class constraint to make sure (at compile-time) that we don’t run into the problem I mentioned earlier around calling value type methods. It may seem slightly odd that we’re using reflection to call MagicMethodHelper when the whole point of the exercise was to avoid invoking methods by reflection – but we only need to invoke the method once, and we can use the returned delegate many times. Here’s the complete program, ready to compile and run:

using System;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Text;

public class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        MethodInfo indexOf = typeof(string).GetMethod("IndexOf", new Type[]{typeof(char)});
        MethodInfo getByteCount = typeof(Encoding).GetMethod("GetByteCount", new Type[]{typeof(string)});

        Func<string, object, object> indexOfFunc = MagicMethod<string>(indexOf);
        Func<Encoding, object, object> getByteCountFunc = MagicMethod<Encoding>(getByteCount);

        Console.WriteLine(indexOfFunc("Hello", 'e'));
        Console.WriteLine(getByteCountFunc(Encoding.UTF8, "Euro sign: \u20ac"));
    }

    static Func<T, object, object> MagicMethod<T>(MethodInfo method) where T : class
    {
        // First fetch the generic form
        MethodInfo genericHelper = typeof(Test).GetMethod("MagicMethodHelper", 
            BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.NonPublic);

        // Now supply the type arguments
        MethodInfo constructedHelper = genericHelper.MakeGenericMethod
            (typeof(T), method.GetParameters()[0].ParameterType, method.ReturnType);

        // Now call it. The null argument is because it's a static method.
        object ret = constructedHelper.Invoke(null, new object[] {method});

        // Cast the result to the right kind of delegate and return it
        return (Func<T, object, object>) ret;
    }    

    static Func<TTarget, object, object> MagicMethodHelper<TTarget, TParam, TReturn>(MethodInfo method)
        where TTarget : class
    {
        // Convert the slow MethodInfo into a fast, strongly typed, open delegate
        Func<TTarget, TParam, TReturn> func = (Func<TTarget, TParam, TReturn>)Delegate.CreateDelegate
            (typeof(Func<TTarget, TParam, TReturn>), method);

        // Now create a more weakly typed delegate which will call the strongly typed one
        Func<TTarget, object, object> ret = (TTarget target, object param) => func(target, (TParam) param);
        return ret;
    }
}

Conclusion

This isn’t the kind of thing which I enjoy having in production code. It’s frightfully complicated – we’re finding a method via reflection, invoking a different (and generic) method via reflection in order to turn the first method into a delegate and then return a different delegate which calls it. While I don’t like having “clever” code like this in production, I take immense pleasure from getting it to work in the first place. This is one of the rare occasions where the result makes all the cleverness worth it, too – combined with the other optimisations, my Protocol Buffers port is now much, much faster – the reflection invocations are no longer a bottleneck. (We lose a little bit of efficiency by having one delegate call another, but it’s still massively quicker than using reflection.)

Regardless of the complexity involved later on, the simpler parts of this post (calling Delegate.CreateDelegate where you already know the signature, and the possibility of creating open delegates) are likely to be more widely applicable. By using a delegate instead of MethodInfo, not only are there significant performance improvements, but also a strongly typed way of calling the method. From now on, I’ll certainly be considering whether or not it might be worth using a delegate any time I use reflection.