Why are public fields faster than properties?

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Edit 2:

I had another potential thought here:

You mentioned that you are running on x64. I’ve tested this same issue on x86, and seen the same performance when using auto-properties vs. fields. However, if you look around on Connect and mailing list/forum posts, there are many references online to the fact that the x64 CLR’s JIT is a different code base, and has very different performance characteristics to the x86 JIT. My guess is this is one place where x64 is still lagging behind.

Also, FYI, the struct/method/etc thing fixed in .net 3.5sp1 was on the x86 side, and was the fact that method calls that took structs as a parameter would never be inlined on x86 prior to .net3.5sp1. That’s pretty much irrelevant to this discussion on your system.

Edit 3:

Another thing: As to why XNA is using fields. I actually was at the Game Fest where they announced XNA. Rico Mariani gave a talk where he brought up many of the same points that are on his blog. It seems the XNA folks had similar ideas when they developed some of the core objects. See:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2006/09/07/745085.aspx

Particularly, check out point #2.

As for why automatic properties are better than public fields:

They allow you to change the implementation in v2 of your class, and add logic into the property get/set routines as needed, without changing your interface to your end users. This can have a profound effect on your ability to maintain your library and code over time.

—- From original post – but discovered this wasn’t the issue——–

Were you running a release build outside of VS? That can be one explanation for why things aren’t being optimized. Often, if you are running in VS, even an optimized release build, the VS host process disables many functions of the JIT. This can cause performance benchmarks to change.

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