What does GetType() return on an instance of Type?

Question

I ran across this code during some debugging.

private bool HasBaseType(Type type, out Type baseType)
{
    Type originalType = type.GetType();
    baseType = Get         


        

Answer 1

It looks like neither. When you call GetType on a Type instance, it seems to always return RuntimeType.

I checked this against the System assembly by running this code snippet:

Assembly
  .GetAssembly(typeof(int))
  .GetTypes()
  .Where(type => type.GetType() == type)

Edit: As Luke clarified in comments, the "original type" is only actually the original type when given a RuntimeType - it doesn't work for anything else. And since that type is internal to system, the method seems simply wrong.