Value types - e.g. TimeSpan

Ruby IronRuby
1

Hi all

I’ve had some discussions offline about accessing the properties of
TimeSpan.

The issue is that while the static methods on TimeSpan work, the
instance
properties don’t:

t = System::TimeSpan.from_seconds(1.1) # works
m = t.total_milliseconds # doesn’t work

All my testing done on iron7 on WP7 of course!

The route of this problem seems to be (from Tomas M.):

The problem is that the interpreter doesn’t support instance method
calls on

value types:

if (!node.Method.IsStatic && node.Method.DeclaringType.IsValueType &&
!node.Method.DeclaringType.IsPrimitive)) _forceCompile = true;

Such method can update the value type in-place, which is difficult to
interpret. We don’t know that the method is only reading the fields of the
value type, so we disallow interpretation even if we could do that. I’ll
think about how to fix this but am not sure if we can do anything
reasonable.

We’re thinking about this… one thing is that I think we could allow
this
for Get methods - for readonly properties - I need to read the code a
bit (a
lot!) more before I can comment on whether this is correct though…

Stuart

2

You could probably allow methods as well, as the vast majority of value
types are immutable. Even in C#, calling Set on a value type only works
if
that value type happens to be a local variable. If it comes back from a
property then it just becomes a no-op.

Jonathan