Advantages to Using Private Static Methods

Question

When creating a class that has internal private methods, usually to reduce code duplication, that don\'t require the use of any instance fields, are there performance or mem

Answer 1

A call to a static method generates a call instruction in Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL), whereas a call to an instance method generates a callvirt instruction, which also checks for a null object references. However, most of the time the performance difference between the two is not significant.

src: MSDN - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/79b3xss3(v=vs.110).aspx

Answer 2

I very much prefer all private methods to be static unless they really can't be. I would much prefer the following:

public class MyClass
{
    private readonly MyDependency _dependency;

    public MyClass(MyDependency dependency)
    {
        _dependency = dependency;
    }

    public int CalculateHardStuff()
    {
        var intermediate = StepOne(_dependency);
        return StepTwo(intermediate);
    }

    private static int StepOne(MyDependency dependency)
    {
        return dependency.GetFirst3Primes().Sum();
    }

    private static int StepTwo(int intermediate)
    {
        return (intermediate + 5)/4;
    }
}

public class MyDependency
{
    public IEnumerable<int> GetFirst3Primes()
    {
        yield return 2;
        yield return 3;
        yield return 5;
    }
}

over every method accessing the instance field. Why is this? Because as this process of calculating becomes more complex and the class ends up with 15 private helper methods, then I REALLY want to be able to pull them out into a new class that encapsulates a subset of the steps in a semantically meaningful way.

When MyClass gets more dependencies because we need logging and also need to notify a web service (please excuse the cliche examples), then it's really helpful to easily see what methods have which dependencies.

Tools like R# lets you extract a class from a set of private static methods in a few keystrokes. Try doing it when all private helper methods are tightly coupled to the instance field and you'll see it can be quite a headache.