Writing Efficient Code
It is common knowledge that it is always best to write small and tight classes and class functions. Aside from the fact that it makes your classes easier to maintain and understand, your assemblies are lighter and easier to load and unload by the CLR. An interesting thread, on gotdotnet pointed to an interesting fact described on MSDN.
The quick gist of this is that the first 4 declared variables are the most efficient to access and will provide you the best performance. Here is a quote from MSDN:
The stack transitional behavior, in sequential order, is:
The local variable value at the specified index is pushed onto the stack.
The ldloc instruction pushes the contents of the local variable number at the passed index onto the evaluation stack, where the local variables are numbered 0 onwards. Local variables are initialized to 0 before entering the method only if the initialize flag on the method is true. There are 65,535 (2^16-1) local variables possible (0-65,534). Index 65,535 is not valid since likely implementations will use a 2-byte integer to track both a local's index, along with the total number of locals for a given method. If an index of 65535 had been made valid, it would require a wider integer to track the number of locals in such a method.
The ldloc.0, ldloc.1, ldloc.2, and ldloc.3 instructions provide an efficient encoding for accessing the first four local variables.
The type of the value is the same as the type of the local variable, which is specified in the method header. See Partition I. Local variables that are smaller than 4 bytes long are expanded to type int32 when they are loaded onto the stack. Floating-point values are expanded to their native size (type F).
The following Emit constructor overloads can use the ldloc opcode:
The stack transitional behavior, in sequential order, is:
The ldloc instruction pushes the contents of the local variable number at the passed index onto the evaluation stack, where the local variables are numbered 0 onwards. Local variables are initialized to 0 before entering the method only if the initialize flag on the method is true. There are 65,535 (2^16-1) local variables possible (0-65,534). Index 65,535 is not valid since likely implementations will use a 2-byte integer to track both a local's index, along with the total number of locals for a given method. If an index of 65535 had been made valid, it would require a wider integer to track the number of locals in such a method.
The ldloc.0, ldloc.1, ldloc.2, and ldloc.3 instructions provide an efficient encoding for accessing the first four local variables.
The type of the value is the same as the type of the local variable, which is specified in the method header. See Partition I. Local variables that are smaller than 4 bytes long are expanded to type int32 when they are loaded onto the stack. Floating-point values are expanded to their native size (type F).
Happy Coding
-Mathew Nolton