Roslyn coding conventions applied

Posted on April 22, 2016 · 2 mins read · tagged with: #optimization #RampUpNet #Roslyn

Roslyn is a ‘compiler as a service’ provided for both VisualBasic.NET & C#. It has a thriving community of people providing new features for .NET languages. One of the most important parts of this community is a guideline how to contribute, which defines basic rules for coding and issuing pull requests. The most important part, not only from Roslyn perspective, but as general .NET guidance are Coding Conventions.

Avoid allocations in hot paths

This is the rule, that should be close to every .NET developer heart, not only these that work on a compiler. It’s not about ‘premature optimization’. It’s about writing performant code that actually can sustain its performance when executing its hot paths in majority of the requests. Give it a try, and when writing some code next time (today?) have this rule in mind. Awareness of this kind, may result in having no need for profiling your production system or making a dump just to know that allocating a list for every cell o f two dimensional array wasn’t the best approach.

What’s your hot path

That’s a good question that everyone should answer on their system basis. I asked this question a few months ago for my RampUp library:

what’s the hot path for a system using message passing?

The answer was surprisingly obvious: the message passing itself. EventStore, using a similar approach uses classes for message passing. This plus every other object creates some GC pressure. Back then, I asked myself a question, is it possible to use structs for internal process communication and come up with a good way of passing them? My reasoning was following: if I remove the GC pressure from messages, then I remove the hottest path of allocations and this can greatly improve stability of my system. Was it easy? No it wasn’t as I needed to emit a lot of code and discover some interesting properties of CLR. Did it work? Yes, it did.

Next time when you write a piece of code or design a system keep the hot path question in your mind and answer it. It’s worth it.