Martin's Activity Log

Generic observations

Today, I tracked a really bad boy down which caused very weird failures of gmcs compiled assemblies on the MS runtime. So, while looking at the following example, I made some interesting obervations:

• The most important thing is that the entries in the GenericParam table must be sorted according to the owner field.

• In IL, we generate

  .class interface private abstract auto ansi 'IFoo`1'<T>
  

  and

  .class private auto ansi beforefieldinit 'Foo`1'<T>
         extends [mscorlib]System.Object
         implements class 'IFoo`1'<!T>
  

• However, for the explicit interface implementation, we generate

  .method private hidebysig newslot virtual final instance void  'IFoo<T>.Test'<u>(!T t, !!U u) cil managed
  

  Note that this does not include the generic arity like in the class name.

• To make things really confusing, we do use the arity in the .override:

  .override  method instance void class 'IFoo`1'<!T>::Test<[1]>(!0,!!U)