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Thursday, March 26, 2009

Die, .NET. Thanks.

So, just encountered an (extremely) evil quirk of the .NET platform in a bug.

Everyone who programs .NET knows that one key difference between the two is that structs are (without ref specified) always passed by value, while classes are passed by reference. Apparently that rule is not limited to actual passing of structs, themselves; passing a "pointer" to a callback function for an instance of a struct causes a copy of the entire struct to be passed, and the callback is then called on that copy, not your original instance.

Example:
system.FindCollisions(collisionSet.OnPossibleCollision, workingSet);

In this line, FindCollisions receives a local copy of collisionSet. When it then calls that callback function, that callback operates on the local copy, not on collisionSet itself.

I'm not sure whether this is by design or whether it's a bug. While it's consistent with the policy of always passing structs by value, the fact that it's so counter-intuitive makes me wonder if it might not be a bug.

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