Performance of calling delegates vs methods

Following this question - Pass Method as Parameter using C# and some of my personal experience I'd like to know a little more about the performance of calling a delegate vs just calling a method in C#.

Although delegates are extremely convenient, I had an app that did lots of callbacks via delegates and when we rewrote this to use callback interfaces we got an order of magnitude speed improvement. This was with .NET 2.0 so I'm not sure how things have changed with 3 and 4.

How are calls to delegates handled internally in the compiler/CLR and how does this affect performance of method calls?

EDIT - To clarify what I mean by delegates vs callback interfaces.

For asynchronous calls my class could provide an OnComplete event and associated delegate which the caller could subscribe to.

Alternatively I could create an ICallback interface with an OnComplete method that the caller implements and then registers itself with the class that will then call that method on completion (i.e. the way Java handles these things).

c# .net performance delegates

Edit Report

I find it completely implausible that a delegate is substantially faster or slower than a virtual method. If anything the delegate should be negligibly faster. At a lower level, delegates are usually implemented something like (using C-style notation, but please forgive any minor syntax errors as this is just an illustration):

struct Delegate {
    void* contextPointer;   // What class instance does this reference?
    void* functionPointer;  // What method does this reference?
}

Calling a delegate works something like:

struct Delegate myDelegate = somethingThatReturnsDelegate();
// Call the delegate in de-sugared C-style notation.
ReturnType returnValue = 
    (*((FunctionType) *myDelegate.functionPointer))(myDelegate.contextPointer);

A class, translated to C, would be something like:

struct SomeClass {
    void** vtable;        // Array of pointers to functions.
    SomeType someMember;  // Member variables.
}

To call a vritual function, you would do the following:

struct SomeClass *myClass = someFunctionThatReturnsMyClassPointer();
// Call the virtual function residing in the second slot of the vtable.
void* funcPtr = (myClass -> vtbl)[1];
ReturnType returnValue = (*((FunctionType) funcPtr))(myClass);

They're basically the same, except that when using virtual functions you go through an extra layer of indirection to get the function pointer. However, this extra indirection layer is often free because modern CPU branch predictors will guess the address of the function pointer and speculatively execute its target in parallel with looking up the address of the function. I've found (albeit in D, not C#) that virtual function calls in a tight loop are not any slower than non-inlined direct calls, provided that for any given run of the loop they're always resolving to the same real function.

answered 2010-01-17T22:51:30.813

Performance of calling delegates vs methods

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