Ankh Morpork's Finest Coder
Monday, November 29, 2004
IL Strings - Freaky by nature
PROBLEM STATEMENT - Going through my project for work with the ILDASM tool was quite interesting. I noticed the following line:-
IL_000b: ldstr "There was a problem while trying to cancel authent" + "ication. Please inform the trainer."
Why is the IL split? My first though was that the string is being concatenated at runtime by the JIT. Then I looked up the ldstr on MSDN and found this quote:
The ldstr instruction pushes an object reference (type O) to a new string object representing the specific string literal stored in the metadata. The ldstr instruction allocates the requisite amount of memory and performs any format conversion required to convert the string literal from the form used in the file to the string format required at runtime.
So I scratch my head again and wonder why the sting was broken into two parts. First part exactly 50 characters long?
POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS - Anytime you have a string that is more that 50 characters long, it will automatically be split when written in IL. Then during JIT, it will be concatenated. I also read somewhere that if you have 4 or more string concatenated, then you really should use the StringBuilder. Does this mean that any string 200 characters or above should be created using the StringBuilder?
What effect does this have on Resource Strings from your Resx files?