Pushing the limits of state machines in C# compiler … or actually not
Tuesday this week I was explaining some internals of await. And as you might know it’s backed by a state machine not different from what yield does. The state machine uses int field to track it’s state. And I’ve got an idea to try, what would happen if I’d create a method with more states than the int can hold…
I created a file with only a single method containing only yield return 0; statements. A lot of these. The resulting file was over 60GB in size. Just for fun I tried to open that file in Visual Studio. Bad idea. Thus to eliminate any limits along the way, I switched to pure csc (Roslyn, from VS 2015 Update 1).
Trying to compile that file immediately returned error CS1504: Source file '...' could not be opened ('Arithmetic result exceeded 32 bits. '). Well, at least something. The problem is, I have no idea what limit it hit exactly. Was the file too big in general. Is there way too much lines? Or …
So I searched a little and found Peter Ritchie’s blog post where he was actually trying to do the same Though he used await statements. But the backing state machine shares the structure with what yield produces. Read the post if you’re interested in details.
Because somebody already did the work of trying to push it to the limit, I decided I’ll stop here. Frankly I should have searched first to save myself few minutes of time it took to generate the 60+GB file. But that’s how I roll. 😃
The good news is, the int used for the state machine is not an issue at all. You’ll hit other limits way sooner. And honestly having more than, say, 100 awaits or yields seems to be like a pretty bad code anyway in real world.
