Can Delegate.DynamicInvoke be avoided in this generic code?

Question

This question is partly about delegates, and partly about generics.

Given the simplified code:

internal sealed class TypeDispatchProcessor
{
    private          


        

Answer 1

I strongly suspect that wrapping the calls would be a lot more efficient than using DynamicInvoke. Your code would then be:

internal sealed class TypeDispatchProcessor
{
    private readonly Dictionary<Type, Action<object>> _actionByType 
        = new Dictionary<Type, Action<object>>();

    public void RegisterProcedure<T>(Action<T> action)
    {
        _actionByType[typeof(T)] = item => action((T) item);
    }

    public void ProcessItem(object item)
    {
        Action<object> action;
        if (_actionByType.TryGetValue(item.GetType(), out action))
        {
            action(item);
        }
    }
}

It's worth benchmarking it, but I think you'll find this a lot more efficient. DynamicInvoke has to check all the arguments with reflection etc, instead of the simple cast in the wrapped delegate.

Answer 2

If you need to extend this to wrapping member invocations from classes without using Reflection.Emit you can do so by creating a series of compiler hints that can map a class and a function parameter list or return type.

Basically you need to create lambdas that take objects as parameters and return an object. Then use a generic function that the compiler sees AOT to create a cache of suitable methods to call the member and cast the parameters. The trick is to create open delegates and pass them through a second lamda to get to the underlying hint at runtime.

You do have to provide the hints for every class and signature (but not every method or property).

I've worked up a class here that does this, it's a bit too long to list out in this post.

In performance testing it's no where near as good as the example above, but it is generic which means it works in the circumstances I needed. Performance around 4.5x on reading a property compared to Invoke.

Answer 3

So I did some measurements on this.

var delegates = new List<Delegate>();
var actions = new List<Action<object>>();

const int dataCount = 100;
const int loopCount = 10000;

for (int i = 0; i < dataCount; i++)
{
    Action<int> a = d => { };
    delegates.Add(a);
    actions.Add(o => a((int)o));
}

var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
for (int i = 0; i < loopCount; i++)
{
    foreach (var action in actions)
        action(i);
}
Console.Out.WriteLine("{0:#,##0} Action<object> calls in {1:#,##0.###} ms",
    loopCount * dataCount, sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds);

sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
for (int i = 0; i < loopCount; i++)
{
    foreach (var del in delegates)
        del.DynamicInvoke(i);
}
Console.Out.WriteLine("{0:#,##0} DynamicInvoke calls in {1:#,##0.###} ms",
    loopCount * dataCount, sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds);

I created a number of items to indirectly invoke to avoid any kind of optimisation the JIT might perform.

The results are quite compelling!

1,000,000 Action calls in 47.172 ms
1,000,000 Delegate.DynamicInvoke calls in 12,035.943 ms

1,000,000 Action calls in 44.686 ms
1,000,000 Delegate.DynamicInvoke calls in 12,318.846 ms

So, in this case, substituting the call to DynamicInvoke for an extra indirect call and a cast was approximately 270 times faster. All in a day's work.