Deferred execution – lesson learned
Today was a refactoring day. Well half of it. I was in correct mood. And I was bitten by old code and my own ignorance of deferred execution for enumerables.
I was refactoring ForEach extension method on IEnumerable<T> interface. The signature was void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source, Action<T> action). You probably know what it did. Right next to it was method IEnumerable<T> ForEachFluent<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source, Action<T> action), with pretty similar body. Simplified it could look like this.
public static void ForEachA<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source, Action<T> action)
{
foreach (var item in source)
{
action.Invoke(item);
}
}
public static IEnumerable<T> ForEachB<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source, Action<T> action)
{
foreach (var item in source)
{
action.Invoke(item);
yield return item;
}
}
It was calling for merging. The first one is basically just throwing away the result, isn’t it? I can call the second one there. Or can I? Here’s a simple test.
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var dataA = new[] { new Foo(), new Foo(), new Foo() };
var dataB = new[] { new Foo(), new Foo(), new Foo() };
dataA.ForEachA(x => x.Bar = true);
dataB.ForEachB(x => x.Bar = true);
Console.WriteLine(string.Join<Foo>(", ", dataA));
Console.WriteLine(string.Join<Foo>(", ", dataB));
}
}
class Foo
{
public bool Bar { get; set; }
public override string ToString() => Bar.ToString();
}
Running it gives this.
True, True, True
False, False, False
It may look obvious now, given the post’s title. But I’m telling you I was confused. I even fired up ildasm and started hunting. I was so sure it’s some deep, weird C# behavior. Obviously it isn’t. The ForEachB is turned into enumerator and until somebody really goes through it, nothing is executed – deferred execution at it’s best (more detailed info here or here). Silly me.
Of course I can merge these together, but the ForEachA (or the ForEach in original code) needs to just really iterate over the result of ForEachB. Next time I’ll first try to do some basic debugging, before diving straight into IL. Lesson learned.
