How does the assignment of the null literal to a System.Nullable type get handled by .Net (C#)?

Question

I was wondering if anyone knows how the C# compiler handles the following assignment:

int? myInt = null;

My assumption is that there is an

Answer 1

The statement:

int? myInt = null;

Gets compiled as:

  .locals init (valuetype [mscorlib]System.Nullable`1 V_0)
  IL_0000:  ldloca.s   V_0
  IL_0002:  initobj    valuetype [mscorlib]System.Nullable`1

Which, according to the MSDN, means «Initialize each field of the value type at a specified address to a null reference or a 0 of the appropriate primitive type.»

So there's no constructor or conversion here. HasValue will return false, and trying to get its Value will throw an InvalidOperationException. Unless you use GetValueOrDefault of course.