I'm just revising chapter 4 of C# in Depth which deals with nullable types, and I'm adding a section about using the "as" operator, which allows you to write:

object o = ...;
int? x = o as int?;
if (x.HasValue)
{
    ... // Use x.Value in here
}

I thought this was really neat, and that it could improve performance over the C# 1 equivalent, using "is" followed by a cast - after all, this way we only need to ask for dynamic type checking once, and then a simple value check.

This appears not to be the case, however. I've included a sample test app below, which basically sums all the integers within an object array - but the array contains a lot of null references and string references as well as boxed integers. The benchmark measures the code you'd have to use in C# 1, the code using the "as" operator, and just for kicks a LINQ solution. To my astonishment, the C# 1 code is 20 times faster in this case - and even the LINQ code (which I'd have expected to be slower, given the iterators involved) beats the "as" code.

Is the .NET implementation of isinst for nullable types just really slow? Is it the additional unbox.any that causes the problem? Is there another explanation for this? At the moment it feels like I'm going to have to include a warning against using this in performance sensitive situations...

Results:

Cast: 10000000 : 121
As: 10000000 : 2211
LINQ: 10000000 : 2143

Code:

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Linq;

class Test
{
    const int Size = 30000000;

    static void Main()
    {
        object[] values = new object[Size];
        for (int i = 0; i < Size - 2; i += 3)
        {
            values[i] = null;
            values[i+1] = "";
            values[i+2] = 1;
        }

        FindSumWithCast(values);
        FindSumWithAs(values);
        FindSumWithLinq(values);
    }

    static void FindSumWithCast(object[] values)
    {
        Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
        int sum = 0;
        foreach (object o in values)
        {
            if (o is int)
            {
                int x = (int) o;
                sum += x;
            }
        }
        sw.Stop();
        Console.WriteLine("Cast: {0} : {1}", sum, 
                          (long) sw.ElapsedMilliseconds);
    }

    static void FindSumWithAs(object[] values)
    {
        Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
        int sum = 0;
        foreach (object o in values)
        {
            int? x = o as int?;
            if (x.HasValue)
            {
                sum += x.Value;
            }
        }
        sw.Stop();
        Console.WriteLine("As: {0} : {1}", sum, 
                          (long) sw.ElapsedMilliseconds);
    }

    static void FindSumWithLinq(object[] values)
    {
        Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
        int sum = values.OfType<int>().Sum();
        sw.Stop();
        Console.WriteLine("LINQ: {0} : {1}", sum, 
                          (long) sw.ElapsedMilliseconds);
    }
}