1/5 A little know C#/.NET fact is that one can end up in a situation where `this is null` evaluates to true. One just needs a bit of reflection. 
2/5 There's good reasons why it's little known. For one, it's kind of useless. The other reason is that doing that starts breaking invariants. For example, C# assumes `this` is always non-null. Call to `this.AndAgain()` should throw, but it won't.
3/5 It also breaks invariants within the runtime. This snippet will work as expected, no surprises:
4/5 But this one will hit a `NullReferenceException` in a spot that the debugger cannot figure out. It has to do with how generic code over reference types gets shared within the runtime.
5/5 .NET Native has an optimization that eliminates the entire method bodies on types that were never seen as allocated that also doesn't play well with this. This makes a good party trick (if the parties you go to are like the parties I go to), but don't do this in real code
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
![class Program { static readonly byte[] s_bytes = Compute](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcMz5XdaMAEm5ck.jpg)
