Jonathan Pryor's web log

openSUSE 11.1: Where'd my hostname go?

After playing with the openSUSE 11.1 beta releases and final release, I finally installed it onto my main workstation. Funny how actually using it ~full-time shows things that were previous missed...

In this case, what greeted me when I opened a shell was:

jon@linux-jcq7$

This was rather unexpected, as this wasn't the hostname I wanted. No matter, this was normal after a fresh install (and has been happening for eons). So off I go to YaST to edit the Network Settings (/sbin/yast2 lan)...

Previously (i.e. on openSUSE 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and 11.0), I could go to the Hostname/DNS tab, to the Hostname and Domain Name section, and specify a Hostname. (Whereupon everything would break until the next reboot as Gnome didn't seem to like the hostname changing on it, but at least I had the right hostname!)

Under openSUSE 11.1, this is disabled when NetworkManager controls things. (Again, this was not the case under 11.0 and prior releases, even when using NetworkManager to control things.)

So how do we change the hostname? Perusing Control Center brought forth the Network Connections applet → Wired tab → connection name (e.g. System eth0) → Edit → IPv4 Settings tab's DHCP Client ID textbox. This was nice to find -- I'd often wondered why setting the DHCP Client Identifier within YaST Network Settings seemingly had no effect; DHCP Client ID does work -- but it had no effect during bootup (presumably because NetworkManager isn't running early enough to set the hostname), so my shell prompt was still wrong.

Similarly, the "traditional" technique of hand-editing /etc/hosts (or using the new-fangled Hostnames YaST applet) seemed to have no effect on the system name after a reboot.

So how do we really change the hostname? Edit /etc/HOSTNAME, which is a single line file containing the fully-qualified hostname to use during bootup.

Icecream & Firewalls

Earlier this year, Michael Meeks described how to use icecream to speed up builds. One problem was that originally it required disabling the firewall on most systems. There was an update mentioning that setting FW_CONFIGURATIONS_EXT could be used to open up the appropriate ports in the firewall so that things would Just Work. Alas, that doesn't work for me on openSUSE 11.1.

Thus, if using the openSUSE Firewall Allowed Services configuration doesn't work (which is what setting FW_CONFIGURATIONS_EXT modifies), there is one alternate strategy to use before disabling the firewall: manually specify the scheduler system on the daemon systems within the icecream configuration file:

sudo sed -i 's/ICECREAM_SCHEDULER_HOST=""/ICECREAM_SCHEDULER_HOST="SCHEDULER"/' /etc/sysconfig/icecream

Replace SCHEDULER with the appropriate host name or IP address of your scheduler system.

Announcing NDesk.Options 0.2.1

I am pleased to announce the release of NDesk.Options 0.2.1. NDesk.Options is a C# program option parser library, inspired by Perl's Getopt::Long option parser.

To download, visit the NDesk.Options web page:

http://www.ndesk.org/Options

Usage

See http://www.ndesk.org/Options and the OptionSet documentation for examples.

What's New?

There have been several minor changes since the previous 0.2.0 release:

• The OptionSet base class has been changed from Collection<Option> to KeyedCollection<string, Option>, as KeyedCollection<string, Option> is conceptually closer to what OptionSet supports: one or more strings as aliases for a single Option.
• OptionSet.GetOptionForName() has been deprecated in favor of using KeyedCollection.Item(string).
• C# 2.0 Compatibility. The unit tests require a C# 3.0 compiler, but the actual option parser and related classes now only require a C# 2.0 compiler.
• Default argument handling support. This is useful for argument runs, in which the meaning of later options depends upon a prior argument, e.g.: mdoc-assemble --format=ecma A B --format=man C (where A and B are processed with --format=ecma in effect, while C is processed with --format=man in effect).
• The Option.Description property can now contain value formatting codes which are used by OptionSet.WriteOptionDescriptions().
• The Option.Description property is now automatically line-wrapped within OptionSet.WriteOptionDescriptions().
• ndesk-options.pc fixes for pkg-config.
• Unit tests now depend on NUnit and have been split out into separate files.

Threading: Lock Nesting

a.k.a. Why the Java 1.0 collections were rewritten...

Threading is an overly complicated subject, covered in great detail at other locations and in many books. However, there is one subject that either I haven't seen discussed too often, or somehow have managed to miss while reading the plethora of threading sources, something I'll call lock nesting depth:

lock nesting depth

The number of locks that must be acquired and held simultaneously in order to perform a given operation.

In general, the lock nesting depth should be kept as small as possible; anything else results in extra, possibly unnecessary/extraneous locks, which serve only to slow down performance for no added benefit.

First, an aside: why does threading code require locks? To maintain data invariants for data shared between threads, preventing the data from being corrupted. Note that this is not necessarily the same as producing "correct" data, as there may be internal locks to prevent internal data corruption but the resulting output may not be "correct" (in as much as it isn't the output that we want).

The prototypical example of "non-corrupting but not correct" output is when multiple threads write to the (shared) terminal:

using System;
using System.Threading;

class Test {
	public static void Main ()
	{
		Thread[] threads = new Thread[]{
			new Thread ( () => { WriteMessage ("Thread 1"); } ),
			new Thread ( () => { WriteMessage ("Thread 2"); } ),
		};
		foreach (var t in threads)
			t.Start ();
		foreach (var t in threads)
			t.Join ();
	}

	static void WriteMessage (string who)
	{
		Console.Write ("Hello from ");
		Console.Write (who);
		Console.Write ("!\n");
	}
}

Output for the above program can vary from the sensible (and desirable):

$ mono ls.exe 
Hello from Thread 2!
Hello from Thread 1!
$ mono ls.exe 
Hello from Thread 1!
Hello from Thread 2!

To the downright "corrupt":

Hello from Hello from Hello from Hello from Thread 2!
Thread 1!

(This can happen when Thread 1 is interrupted by Thread 2 before it can write out its entire message.)

Notice what's going on here: as far as the system is concerned, what we're doing is safe -- no data is corrupted, my terminal/shell/operating system/planet isn't going to go bonkers, everything is well defined. It's just that in this circumstance "well defined" doesn't match what I, as the developer/end user, desired to see: one of the first two sets of output.

The solution, as always, is to either add a a lock within WriteMessage to ensure that the output is serialized as desired:

	static object o = new object ();
	static void WriteMessage (string who)
	{
		lock (o) {
			Console.Write ("Hello from ");
			Console.Write (who);
			Console.Write ("!\n");
		}
	}

Or to instead ensure that the message can't be split up, working within the predefined semantics of the terminal:

	static void WriteMessage (string who)
	{
		string s = "Hello from " + who + "!\n";
		Console.Write (s);
	}

(Which can oddly generate duplicate messages on Mono; not sure what's up with that... More here.)

For the WriteMessage that uses locks, the lock nesting depth is 2, and this can't be readily improved (because Console.Write is static, and thus must be thread safe as any thread could execute it at any time).

Returning to this entry's subtitle, why were the Java 1.0 collections rewritten? Because they were all internally thread safe. This had it's uses, should you be sharing a Hashtable or Vector between threads, but even then it was of limited usefulness, as it only protected the internal state for a single method call, not any state that may require more than one function call. Consider this illustrative code which counts the number of times a given token is encountered:

Hashtable data = new Hashtable ();
for (String token : tokens) {
    if (data.containsKey (token)) {
        Integer n = (Integer) data.get (token);
        data.put (token, new Integer (n.intValue() + 1));
    }
    else {
        data.put (token, new Integer (1));
    }
}

Yes, Hashtable is thread safe and thus won't have its data corrupted, but it can still corrupt your data should multiple threads execute this code against a shared data instance, as there is a race with the data.containsKey() call, where multiple threads may evaluate the same token "simultaneously" (read: before the following data.put call), and thus each thread would try to call data.put (token, new Integer (1)). The result: a missed token.

The solution is obvious: another lock, controlled by the developer, must be used to ensure valid data:

Object lock = new Object ();
Hashtable data = new Hashtable ();
for (String token : tokens) {
    synchronized (lock) {
        if (data.containsKey (token)) {
            Integer n = (Integer) data.get (token);
            data.put (token, new Integer (n.intValue() + 1));
        }
        else {
            data.put (token, new Integer (1));
        }
    }
}

Consequently, for all "non-trivial" code (where "non-trivial" means "requires more than one method to be called on the collection object in an atomic fashion") will require a lock nesting depth of two. Furthermore, the lock nesting depth would always be at least one, and since many functions were not invoked between multiple threads, or the collection instance local to that particular method, the synchronization within the collection was pure overhead, providing no benefit.

Which is why in Java 1.2, all of the new collection classes such as ArrayList and HashMap are explicitly unsynchronized, as are all of the .NET 1.0 and 2.0 collection types unless you use a synchronized wrapper such as System.Collections.ArrayList.Synchronized (which, again, is frequently of dubious value if you ever need to invoke more than one method against the collection atomically).

Finally, the Threading Design Guidelines of the .NET Framework Design Guidelines for Class Library Developers (book) suggests that all static members be thread safe, but instance member by default should not be thread safe:

Instance state does not need to be thread safe. By default, class libraries should not be thread safe. Adding locks to create thread-safe code decreases performance, increases lock contention, and creates the possibility for deadlock bugs to occur. In common application models, only one thread at a time executes user code, which minimizes the need for thread safety. For this reason, the .NET Framework class libraries are not thread safe by default.

Obviously, there are exceptions -- for example, if a static method returns a shared instance of some class, then all of those instance members must be thread safe as they can be accessed via the static method (System.Reflection.Assembly must be thread safe, as an instance of Assembly is returned by the static method Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly). By default, though, instance members should not be thread safe.

HackWeek Summary

In case you missed it, last week was "Hackweek" at Novell.

My week was less "hacking" and more "spit-and-polish." In particular:

• Wrote Mono.Unix.UnixSignal documentation. This only took ~1/2 a day.
• Released NDesk.Options 0.2.0, which in turn involved the vicious cycle of write documentation (and samples), realize I'm missing something or don't like the name, change the library, update the documentation, repeat...

  Consequently, something I thought would only take another half a day wound up taking 3 days, with some changes happening at the last moment (the System.Action`2 removal, thus removing the need to have two different builds depending on whether .NET 2.0 or .NET 3.0 is targeted).

• Improve monodocs2html so that the output sucks...well, less. I won't say that it's actually good now, but it is an improvement. For comparison purposes, NDesk.Options.OptionSet documentation output from:
  • monodocs2html 1.2.6
  • monodocs2html svn

  In particular, note that in the 1.2.6 output that there are three examples as part of the Remarks documentation, but it's rather difficult to tell when one example ends and the next begins (due to the lack of an Example header). The svn version fixes this, adds JavaScript bling so that all sections can be collapsed and expanded, and adds a mini "index" to the top-left so that it's easier to get to the relevant sections (such as skipping the three lengthy examples that precede the Members listing).

I had wanted to do other things as well, such as migrate the monodoc-related programs to use NDesk.Options instead of Mono.GetOptions for option parsing, but such efforts will have to wait until later...

Announcing NDesk.Options 0.2.0

I am pleased to announce the release of NDesk.Options 0.2.0. NDesk.Options is a C# program option parser library, inspired by Perl's Getopt::Long option parser.

To download, visit the NDesk.Options web page:

http://www.ndesk.org/Options

Usage

See http://www.ndesk.org/Options and the OptionSet documentation for examples.

What's New?

There have been numerous changes since the previous 0.1.0 release:

• Mono 1.9 is now required to build. (An svn release was previously required anyway, so this isn't a surprising requirement.)

• Simplify the API by removing all OptionSet.Add() methods which provided an OptionContext to the callback function; this includes:

  • OptionSet.Add(string, Action<string, OptionContext>)
  • OptionSet.Add(string, string, Action<string, OptionContext>)
  • OptionSet.Add<T>(string, Action<T, OptionContext>)
  • OptionSet.Add<T>(string, string, Action<T, OptionContext>)

  If you really need access to an OptionContext, you can Add your own Option and override Option.OnParseComplete(OptionContext).

• By Miguel's request, change the semantics for Options with optional values (arguments that have a type value of `:'). Previously, Options accepting an optional value were virtually identical to Options accepting a required value; the only place they would differ is at the end of the command line, where if a value was missing for a Option with an optional value no error would occur, while an Option with a required value would generate an error.

  Now, we introduce the notion of greediness: required values are greedy, and will eat any number of following arguments in order to fulfill their requirements. Optional values are not greedy, and will only extract a value from the current argument.

  By way of example:

  string color = null;
  var p = new OptionSet () {
      { "-color:", v => color = v },
  };
  p.Parse (new string[]{"--color=auto"});     // 1
  p.Parse (new string[]{"--color", "auto"});  // 2

  In NDesk.Options 0.1.0, (1) and (2) would be identical and color would be given the value auto. In 0.2.0, they are not identical: (1) would assign the value auto to color, while (2) would assign null to color. This permits consistency with GNU ls(1)'s ls --color behavior.

  If a required option were to be specified (by using = instead of :), then (1) and (2) would again have identical results.

• NDesk.Options 0.1.0 restricted option bundling to boolean Options. This restriction has been relaxed so that (1) Options accepting both optional and required values may be bundled with boolean Options, and (2) the optional or required value may be bundled as well. As before, only single character Options may be bundled.

  The logic is as follows: given an argument such as -cvfname:

  1. cvfname must not match a registered Option. If it does match a registered option, then that is the Option that will (eventually) be invoked.
  2. c must be a registered option. If it isn't, then -cvfname is returned from OptionSet.Parse(IEnumerable<string>).
  3. Each character is looked up; if it's a boolean Option, then the associated action is invoked with a non-null value.
  4. If instead the character is an Option accepting one or more optional or required values, then the rest of the argument (not including the Option character) is used as the value. This also follows the greediness of optional vs. required values: optional values will only use the current argument, while required values may use the following argument(s) if e.g. the Option's character is the last character in the sequence.
  5. If a non-Option character is encountered that is not (a) the first character in the sequence, or (b) used as the value for a previous Option, then an OptionException is thrown.

  This does The Right Thing for tar(1)-like option handling, with tar -cvfname ... creating (with verbose output) the file with the name name.

• Options may now accept (or require) more than one value. The Option (string, string, int) constructor allows specifying how many values are accepted/required (depending on whether the Option has optional or required values).

  The Option values are available through the OptionContext.OptionValues collection.

• Direct support for Options accepting/required two values within OptionSet:
  • OptionSet.Add(string, OptionAction<string, string>)
  • OptionSet.Add(string, string, OptionAction<string, string>)
  • OptionSet.Add<TKey, TValue> (string, OptionAction<TKey, TValue>)
  • OptionSet.Add<TKey, TValue> (string, string, OptionAction<TKey, TValue>)

  This now permits reasonable handling of cc(1)-style parameters:

  var macros = new Dictionary<string, string> ();
  var p = new OptionSet () {
      { "D:", (k, v) => { if (k != null) macros.Add (k, v); } },
  };
  p.Parse (new string[]{"-DNAME1", "-DNAME2=VALUE2"});
      // Adds the keys "NAME1" (with null value) 
      // and "NAME2" (with value "VALUE2") to `macros'.

  Note that an optional value is used; if D= were specified, two values would be required, so -DNAME1 -DNAME2=VALUE2 would insert one macro -- NAME1 -- with the value -DNAME2=VALUE2.

• When an Option permits more than one value, it may provide a list of value separator strings, strings that may be used to separate the multiple values. If no separators are listed, = and : are used as the default (thus permitting the previous -DNAME2=VALUE2 example to work; -DNAME2:VALUE2 would have had the same result).

  The value separator strings follow the : or = in the Option prototype. They consist of:

  • The string within { and }.
  • Any other invidividual character.

  Thus, the prototype M:+-*/ would use +, -, *, or / to split values, so -M5+2, -M5-2, -M5*2, and -M5/2 all provide two values (5 and 2) to the M option.

  The prototype N={-->}{=>} would parse both -NA-->B and -NA=>B so that A and B are provided as the two values to the N option.

  As a special construct, the separator {} requires that each value be a separate argument. (This makes no sense for Options with optional values.)

• Naming consistency improvements: an argument is an unparsed string, an option is a parsed argument that corresponds to a registered Option, and a prototype is a description of an Option, describing all aliases, the value type, and value separators. This has resulted in method argument name changes.
• Removal of .NET 3.5 support. Instead of using System.Action`2 from System.Core.dll (or providing an internal equivalent), I've just defined a OptionAction<TKey, TValue> type. This simplifies assembly versioning.

Unix Signal Handling In C#

In the beginning, Unix introduced signal(2), which permits a process to respond to external "stimuli", such as a keyboard interrupt (SIGINT), floating-point error (SIGFPE), dereferencing the NULL pointer (SIGSEGV), and other asynchronous events. And lo, it was...well, acceptable, really, but there wasn't anything better, so it at least worked. (Microsoft, when faced with the same problem of allowing processes to perform some custom action upon an external stimuli, invented Structured Exception Handling.)

Then, in a wrapping binge, I exposed it for use in C# with Stdlib.signal(), so that C# code could register signal handlers to be invoked when a signal occurred.

The problem? By their very nature, signals are asynchronous, so even in a single-threaded program, you had to be very careful about what you did, as your "normal" thread was certainly in the middle of doing something. For example, calling malloc(3) was almost certainly a bad idea, because if the process was in the middle of a malloc call already, you'd have a reentrant malloc call which could corrupt the heap.

This reentrant property impacts all functions in the process, including system calls. Consequently, a list of functions that were "safe" for invocation from signal handlers was standardized, and is listed in the above signal man page; it includes functions such as read(2) and write(2), but not functions like e.g. pwrite(2).

Consequently, these limitations and a few other factors led to the general recommendation that signal handlers should be as simple as possible, such as writing to global variable which the main program occasionally polls.

What's this have to do with Stdlib.signal(), and why was it a mistake to expose it? The problem is the P/Invoke mechanism, which allows marshaling C# delegates as a function pointer that can be invoked from native code. When the function pointer is invoked, the C# delegate is eventually executed.

However, before the C# delegate can be executed, a number of of steps needs to be done first:

1. The first thing it does is to ensure the application domain for the thread where the signal handler executes actually matches the appdomain the delegate comes from, if it isn't it may need to set it and do several things that we can't guarantee are signal context safe...
2. If the delegate is of an instance method we also need to retrieve the object reference, which may require taking locks...

In the same email, lupus suggests an alternate signal handling API that would be safe to use from managed code. Later, I provided a possible implementation. It amounts to treating the UnixSignal instance as a glorified global variable, so that it can be polled to see if the signal has been generated:

UnixSignal signal = new UnixSignal (Signum.SIGINT);
while (!signal.IsSet) {
  /* normal processing */
}

There is also an API to permit blocking the current thread until the signal has been emitted (which also accepts a timeout):

UnixSignal signal = new UnixSignal (Signum.SIGINT);
// Wait for SIGINT to be generated within 5 seconds
if (signal.WaitOne (5000, false)) {
    // SIGINT generated
}

Groups of signals may also be waited on:

UnixSignal[] signals = new UnixSignal[]{
    new UnixSignal (Signum.SIGINT),
    new UnixSignal (Signum.SIGTERM),
};

// block until a SIGINT or SIGTERM signal is generated.
int which = UnixSignal.WaitAny (signals, -1);

Console.WriteLine ("Got a {0} signal!", signals [which].Signum);

This isn't as powerful as the current Stdlib.signal() mechanism, but it is safe to use, doesn't lead to potentially ill-defined or unwanted behavior, and is the best that we can readily provide for use by managed code.

Mono.Unix.UnixSignal is now in svn-HEAD and the mono-1-9 branch, and should be part of the next Mono release.

Announcing NDesk.Options 0.1.0

I am pleased to announce the release of NDesk.Options 0.1.0. NDesk.Options is a C# program option parser library, inspired by Perl's Getopt::Long option parser.

To download, visit the NDesk.Options web page:

http://www.ndesk.org/Options

Usage

See http://www.ndesk.org/Options and the OptionSet documentation for examples.

What's New?

There have been numerous changes since the previous prototype release:

• Full member documentation.
• All errors are reported via OptionException.
• Options has been renamed to OptionSet.
• OptionSet.Parse(IEnumerable<string>) now returns a List<string> instead of an IEnumerable<string>.
• When a registered option follows an option requiring a value, the registered option is used as the option value instead of triggering an error. Thus:

  var p = new OptionSet () {
    { "-n=", v => { /* ignore */ } },
    { "-v",  v => { /* ignore */ } },
  };
  p.Parse (new string[]{"-n", "-v"});

  would previously have triggered an exception, but now uses -v as the value of the -n option. This is consistent with Getopt::Long.

• TypeConverter exceptions are now wrapped within an OptionException, and the Message property contains a useful error message.
• OptionException message localization support.
• Add a OptionContext class that provides contextual information about the current option.
• Add a set of OptionSet.Add() methods that have callbacks that accept an OptionContext parameter.
• Add a set of virtual methods to Option and OptionSet to permit use by subclasses. The OptionSet class-level documentation has an example.

Mono and Mixed Mode Assembly Support

An occasional question on #mono@irc.gnome.org and ##csharp@irc.freenode.net is whether Mono will support mixed-mode assemblies, as generated by Microsoft's Managed Extensions for C++ compiler (Visual Studio 2001, 2003), and C++/CLI (Visual Studio 2005, 2008).

The answer is no, and mixed mode assemblies will likely never be supported.

Why?

First, what's a mixed mode assembly? A mixed mode assembly is an assembly that contains both managed (CIL) and unmanaged (machine language) code. Consequently, they are not portable to other CPU instruction sets, just like normal C and C++ programs and libraries.

Next, why use them? The primary purpose for mixed mode assemblies is as "glue", to e.g. use a C++ library class as a base class of a managed class. This allows the managed class to extend unmanaged methods, allowing the managed code to be polymorphic with respect to existing unmanaged functions. This is extremely useful in many contexts. However, as something like this involves extending a C++ class, it requires that the compiler know all about the C++ compiler ABI (name mangling, virtual function table generation and placement, exception behavior), and thus effectively requires native code. If the base class is within a separate .dll, this will also require that the mixed mode assembly list the native .dll as a dependency, so that the native library is also loaded when the assembly is loaded.

The other thing that mixed mode assemblies support is the ability to export new C functions so that other programs can LoadLibrary() the assembly and GetProcAddress the exported C function.

Both of these capabilities require that the shared library loader for the platform support Portable Executable (PE) files, as assemblies are PE files. If the shared library loader supports PE files, then the loader can ensure that when the assembly is loaded, all listed dependent libraries are also loaded (case 1), or that native apps will be able to load the assembly as if it were a native DLL and resolve DLL entry points against it.

This requirement is met on Windows, which uses the PE file format for EXE and DLL files. This requirement is not met on Linux, which uses ELF, nor is it currently met on Mac OS X, which uses Mach-O.

So why can't mixed mode assemblies be easily supported in Mono? Because ld.so doesn't like PE.

The only workarounds for this would be to either extend assemblies so that ELF files can contain both managed and unmanaged code, or to extend the shared library loader to support the loading of PE files. Using ELF as an assembly format may be useful, but would restrict portability of such ELF-assemblies to only Mono/Linux; .NET could never make use of them, nor could Mono on Mac OS X. Similarly, extending the shared library loader to support PE could be done, but can it support loading both PE and ELF (or Mach-O) binaries into a single process? What happens if a PE file loaded into an "ELF" process requires KERNEL32.DLL? Extending the shared library loader isn't a panacea either.

This limitation makes mixed mode assemblies of dubious value. It is likely solvable, but there are for more important things for Mono to focus on.

So you want to parse a command line...

If you develop command-line apps, parsing the command-line is a necessary evil (unless you write software so simple that it doesn't require any options to control its behavior). Consequently, I've written and used several parsing libraries, including Mono.GetOptions, Perl's Getopt::Long library, and some custom written libraries or helpers.

So what's wrong with them? The problem with Mono.GetOptions is that it has high code overhead: in order to parse a command line, you need a new type (which inherits from Mono.GetOptions.Options) and annotate each field or property within the type with an Option attribute, and let Mono.GetOptions map each command-line argument to a field/property within the Options subclass. See monodocer for an example; search for Opts to find the subclass.

The type-reflector parser is similarly code heavy, if only in a different way. The Mono.Fuse, lb, and omgwtf parsers are one-offs, either specific to a particular environment (e.g. integration with the FUSE native library) or not written with any eye toward reuse.

Which leaves Perl's Getopt::Long library, which I've used for a number of projects, and quite like. It's short, concise, requires no object overhead, and allows seeing at a glance all of the options supported by a program:

use Getopt::Long;
my $data    = "file.dat";
my $help    = undef;
my $verbose = 0;

GetOptions (
	"file=s"    => \$data,
	"v|verbose" => sub { ++$verbose; },
	"h|?|help"  => $help
);

The above may be somewhat cryptic at first, but it's short, concise, and lets you know at a glance that it takes three sets of arguments, one of which takes a required string parameter (the file option).

So, says I, what would it take to provide similar support in C#? With C# 3.0 collection initializers and lambda delegates, I can get something that feels rather similar to the above GetOpt::Long code:

string data = null;
bool help   = false;
int verbose = 0;

var p = new Options () {
	{ "file=",      (v) => data = v },
	{ "v|verbose",  (v) => { ++verbose } },
	{ "h|?|help",   (v) => help = v != null },
};
p.Parse (argv).ToArray ();

Options.cs has the goods, plus unit tests and additional examples (via the tests).

Options is both more and less flexible than Getopt::Long. It doesn't support providing references to variables, instead using a delegate to do all variable assignment. In this sense, Options is akin to Getopt::Long while requiring that all options use a sub callback (as the v|verbose option does above).

Options is more flexible in that it isn't restricted to just strings, integers, and floating point numbers. If there is a TypeConverter registered for your type (to perform string->object conversions), then any type can be used as an option value. To do so, merely declare that type within the callback:

int count = 0;

var p = new Options () {
	{ "c|count=", (int v) => count = v },
};

As additional crack, you can provide an (optional) description of the option so that Options can generate help text for you:

var p = new Options () {
	{ "really-long-option", "description", (v) => {} },
	{ "h|?|help", "print out this message and exit", (v) => {} },
};
p.WriteOptionDescriptions (Console.Out);

would generate the text:

      --really-long-option   description
  -h, -?, --help             print out this message and exit

Options currently supports:

• Parameters of the form: -flag, --flag, /flag, -flag=value, --flag=value, /flag=value, -flag:value, --flag:value, /flag:value, -flag value, --flag value, /flag value.
• "boolean" parameters of the form: -flag, --flag, and /flag. Boolean parameters can have a `+' or `-' appended to explicitly enable or disable the flag (in the same fashion as mcs -debug+). For boolean callbacks, the provided value is non-null for enabled, and null for disabled.
• "value" parameters with a required value (append `=' to the option name) or an optional value (append `:' to the option name). The option value can either be in the current option (--opt=value) or in the following parameter (--opt value). The actual value is provided as the parameter to the callback delegate, unless it's (1) optional and (2) missing, in which case null is passed.
• "bundled" parameters which must start with a single `-' and consists of only single characters. In this manner, -abc would be a shorthand for -a -b -c.
• Option processing is disabled when -- is encountered.

All un-handled parameters are returned from the Options.Parse method, which is implemented as an iterator (hence the calls to .ToArray() in the above C# examples, to force processing).

Announcing Brian Jonathan Pryor

It took longer than we would have liked, and he still arrived earlier than he wanted, but Brian Jonathan Pryor was born this morning at 2:39 AM:

Vital Statistics:

Weight

7 lbs, 9 oz

Length

20 inches

Delivery did not go according to plan. Amber's OBGYN was going on vacation today at noon, so we had originally planned to induce labor on Wednesday. That fell through...because the hospitals were full. They managed to find a room for us on Thursday, so we induced last night. By Friday morning, things had gone "sour" -- Brian's heart rate was lower than the doctors were comfortable with, so Amber underwent an emergency C-section.

Aside from events unfolding in an unexpected fashion, Amber and Brian are doing fine.

Random Musings About Spain/Barcelona

Some random thoughts that occurred to me while in Barcelona:

• The "No Smoking" sign looks more like a "Do Not Enter" sign:

  

• I found it difficult to figure out how to flush some of the toilettes. I realize that there are several different flusher styles, but I wasn't aware there were so many I hadn't come across.
• Unisex bathrooms! They didn't seem that widespread, and I wonder how soon before I see more in the States:

  

• The intersections of roads in Barcelona are "weird." Instead of being a straight right-angle, the corner is "cut," with parking spaces provided in the "cut" area.

  

• I found it incredibly difficult to find the names of roads at intersections. This is probably because I'm not used to looking on the sides of buildings (!), or signs that aren't visible from the corner itself; I frequently couldn't find a road sign at all.
• The McDonald's calorie information sheets also include alergen information (e.g. does it include wheat?, etc.).
• Drink prices are...interesting. Either most States in the USA charge a lot for beer (which is true), or Coca Cola is really expensive in Europe; regardless, at many restaurantes 0.2L of Coke had the same price as 0.3L of beer -- 2.35 €. Free water? Forget about it... It's bottled water, and it frequently has the same price.
• For comparison, I'm used to unlimited fountain drinks for $1.50-$1.95 (free refills!), and free tap water.
• Light switches are more kid-friendly; they're about three feet from the floor, which is easily within reach of Sarah, as opposed to the ~4.5 feet of the light switches in my home.
• Why don't the large maps at bus stations, metro stations, etc. have a "You Are Here" sticker? Some do, but most don't, which makes things more difficult if you're completely lost to begin with...

OOoCon 2007 Trip: Saturday - Monday

Saturday was the "tourist" day; get up early, meet with Shaun, Louis, John, and several others, hike around town:

Sunday I did some actual work (I had a patch written Wednesday, but the wireless access at the University was sufficiently flakey that cvs diff never completed), hit the beach again, and started writing these blog entries.

Monday was the (long!) flight home, limited work (when will planes get real internet access?), and more blog entries.

Mental note: Try to never go through JFK International Airport in New York when returning from an international flight. I had to go through security after going through customs to get on a domestic flight. :-(

OOoCon 2007 Trip: Wednesday - Friday

Wednesday officially started the conference, with a talk by Louis Suárez-Potts.

Then were some excellent presentations on the Aqua port of OpenOffice.org, a meetup at the hotel Tuesday night with the Aqua port folks, and Tapas for dinner. Tapas are like appetizers; many restaurants I go to have a "choose 3 appetizers for one price" deal. Tapas are like a la carte appetizer-sized dishes, allowing for a wide variety of foods to be sampled.

Thursday brought chatting with Niklas Nebel, one of Sun's Calc programmers, the Chart2 overview, and OpenGL transitions. The OpenGL presentation mentioned a desire to create a UI that "mere mortals" can use to create new transitions. I wish them luck in this -- it's very difficult to create a UI that non-experts can use that won't enflame the experts (insert Gnome vs. KDE flame war here as a perfect example).

Friday had a wonderful set of presentations on source code managers, which I discussed earlier. For dinner I was supposted to meet up with Michael Meeks, and sadly got lost instead. Apparently we were on the same road (Catalunya), but since said road is very long I'm not surprised that Shaun and I couldn't find him and his entourage with 30 minutes of walking...

OOoCon 2007 Trip: Monday - Tuesday

The OpenOffice.org 2007 Conference officially started on Wednesday, but since I was going for the whole conference I needed to arrive on Tuesday and leave on Saturday. To arrive on Tuesday, I had to leave on Monday, and to get the best flight bargain I'd have to leave on Sunday. Not too bad -- I'd have a day to look around Barcelona.

So I dutifully show up ~2 hours early for my flight 3:38 PM flight, and find...that there is no reservation for me. Fun! Apparently something somewhere got screwed up (I still haven't heard what), so the flight arrangements I had made in August were canceled...in August. Oops.

Quick phone calls to the travel agency ("what's going on?!") and to my manager got things sorted out in time for the original flight, but with a change in plans; in order to get the cheapest flight, I now would be leaving Barcelona on Monday September 24. This was less than ideal -- it meant that Amber would be alone with Sarah for a day longer than originally planned -- but off I went for my first-ever trip to Spain.

After that beginning, the flights were uneventful. (Long and boring, but uneventful. Silly 8-10 hour flights! At least I was able to finish some research into a bug...)

When I landed in Barcelona on Tuesday at 11:15 AM, I met up with Kohei, who was kind enough to wait for me even though he arrived two hours prior. Thanks! We continued to wait around for Florian to no avail, because we mis-understood his 12:15 departure time for an arrival time. By 1:30 PM we figured he wouldn't be showing up, so we tried to make our way to the Hotel.

That trip was also unexpectedly long, as we had difficulty reading the bus map (can I have a "You Are Here" sticker, please?), and the bus map at the bus stop was truncated, so that we couldn't see the full path of the bus. Long story short, we got off at the wrong place because we didn't realize that the bus would loop around to drop us off at the right place (ugh!), but we quickly hit upon the metro to continue our journy.

Long story short: when someone (hub) is kind enough to provide Metro instructions over IRC, you should probably follow them. :-)

Alas, I also failed to do enough pre-planning, as once we got off the metro at the correct stop (according to hub's instructions), we still needed to find the hotel. As the bus stop was ~6 blocks (and a couple turns) away from the metro stop...this was less than ideal. Apparently we looked dazed-and-confused enough that someone walked up and helped us find our location. Much walking followed.

So by 4:00 PM we hit the hotel, get settled in, speak with kendy about fixing my bug, attend a phone conference for our Novell department, and do the ~40 minute walk from our hotel to the Universitat de Barcelona for "dinner" and registration at 7:00 PM (free shirt!). Much talking was had by all.

In Defense Of git

On Friday at the OpenOffice.org Conference, we had two sessions discussing the future of Source Code Managers in OpenOffice.org: Child workspaces and the OOo SCM system by Jens-Heiner Rechtien and git: the Source Code Manager for OOo? by Jan Holesovsky (kendy).

In the Q&A section after the git presentation, there was a lot of heated debate in which it seemed that Jan and Jens were talking "past" each other. As a git backer, I thought I'd try to bring some clarity to things.

It seemed that Jens has one fundamental problem with git, which itself is fundamental to its operation: commits are not transferred to the remote module; instead, you need an explicit git-push command to send all local changes to the remote repository. Jens claimed three implications of this (that I remember):

1. git did not permit line-by-line authorship information, as with cvs annotate or svn blame.
2. Developers would not see changes made by other developers as soon as they happen.
3. QA and Release Engineering wouldn't be alerted as soon as developers made any change on any child workspace.

The line-by-line authorship information is possible in git with the git blame or git annotate commands (they are synonyms for each other). I suspect I misinterpreted this part of the debate, as all parties should have known that git supported this.

Which leaves the other two issues, which (again) are fundamental to git: a commit does not send any data to the repository. Thus we get to the title of this blog entry: this is a Good Thing™.

Local commits are world changing in a very small way: they're insanely fast, much faster than Subversion. (For example, committing a one-line change to a text file under a Subversion remote directory took me 4.775s; a similar change under git is 0.246s -- 19x faster -- and this is a small Subversion module, ~1.5MB, hosted on the ximian.com Subversion repo, which never seems as loaded as the openoffice.org servers.)

What can you do when your commits are at least 19x faster? You commit more often. You commit when you save your file (or soon thereafter). You commit when you code is 99.995% guaranteed to be WRONG.

Why do this? Because human memory is limited. Most studies show that the average person can remember 7±2 items at a time before they start forgetting things. This matters because a single bug may require changes to multiple different files, and even within a single file your memory will be filled with such issues as what's the scope of this variable?, what's the type of this variable?, what's this method do?, what bug am I trying to fix again?, etc. Human short-term memory is very limited.

So what's the poor developer to do? Most bugs can be partitioned in some way, e.g. into multiple methods or blocks of code, and each such block/sub-problem is solved sequentially -- you pick one sub-problem, solve it, test it (individually if possible), and continue to the next sub-problem. During this process and when you're finished you'll review the patch (is it formatted nicely?, could this code be cleaned up to be more maintainable?), then finally commit your single patch to the repository. It has to be done this way because if you commit at any earlier point in time, someone else will get your intermediate (untested) changes, and you'll break THEIR code flow. This is obviously bad.

During this solve+test cycle, I frequently find that I'll make a set of changes to a file, save it, make other changes, undo them, etc. I never close my file, because (and here's the key point) cvs diff shows me too many changes. It'll show me the changes I made yesterday as well as the changes I made 5 minutes ago, and I need to keep those changes separate -- the ones from yesterday (probably) work, the ones from 5 minutes ago (probably) don't, and the only way I can possibly remember which is the set from 5 minutes ago is to hit Undo in my editor and find out. :-)

So git's local commits are truly world-changing for me: I can commit something as soon as I have it working for a (small) test case, at which point I can move on to related code and fix that sub-problem, even (especially) if it's a change in the same file. I need an easy way to keep track of which are the solved problems (the stuff I fixed yesterday) and the current problem. I need this primarily because the current problem filled my 7±2 memory slots, and I'm unable to easily remember what I did yesterday. (I'm only human! And "easily remember" means "takes less than 0.1s to recall." If you need to think you've already lost.)

This is why I think the other two issues -- developers don't see other changes instantly, and neither does QA -- are a non-issue. It's a feature.

So let's bring in a well-used analogy to programming: writing a book. You write a paragraph, spell check it, save your document, go onto another paragraph/chapter, repeat for a bit, then review what was written. At any part of this process, you'll be ready to Undo your changes because you changed your mind. Changes may need to occur across the entire manuscript.

Remote commits are equivalent to sending each saved manuscript to the author's editor. If someone is going to review/use/depend upon your change, you're going to Damn Well make sure that it Works/is correct before you send that change.

Which brings us to the workflow dichotomy between centralized source code managers (cvs, svn) and distributed managers (git et. al). Centralized source managers by design require more developer effort, because the developer needs to manually track all of the individual changes of a larger work/patch before sending it upstream (as described above).

Decentralized source managers instead help the developer with the tedious effort of tracking individual changes, because the developer can commit without those changes being seen/used by anyone else. The commit instead gets sent when the developer is done with the feature.

This is why I prefer git to Subversion. git allows me to easily work with my 7±2 short-term memory limitations, by allowing me to commit "probably working but not fully tested" code so that I don't need to review those changes at the next cvs diff for the current problem I'm working on.

Yet Another Random Update...

By parental request, more images of Sarah...

Around April, we started setting up a swing set for Sarah:

Of course, play areas need to be filled with mulch:

Unfortunately our back yard isn't level, so some digging was necessary to ensure that the play set was level:

Which was completed just in time for my parents to visit, necessating...a trip to Busch Gardens:

A trip to Maymont Park:

Sarah likes to help with chores:

Sarah still needs her naps...

...Especially when we went to Chicago for July 4th to visit family, and an impromptu baby shower:

And an unfortunate side trip to the hospital:

The unfortunate trip was due to a fall on an escalator, causing Sarah to loser her pinky nail. (Ouch!) I freaked out more than Sarah, initially. We found out ~1.5 weeks after returning home that this was a good thing, as there were many incidents of food poisening at some food stands my parents hit (and we would have hit if not for the hospital).

A Zoo Trip:

4th of July, Sarah meets my cousins:

More recently, we can relax:

Also, after many years of poor health, our oldest cat Bodhi died. To keep Arthur company, we got a new cat last Saturday, Gwen:

Comparing Java and C# Generics

Or, What's Wrong With Java Generics?

What Are Generics

Java 5.0 and C# 2.0 have both added Generics, which permit a multitude of things:

1. Improved compiler-assisted checking of types.
2. Removal of casts from source code (due to (1)).
3. In C#, performance advantages (discussed later).

This allows you to replace the error-prone Java code:

List list = new ArrayList ();
list.add ("foo");
list.add (new Integer (42));  // added by "mistake"

for (Iterator i = list.iterator (); i.hasNext (); ) {
    String s = (String) i.next (); 
       // ClassCastException for Integer -> String
    // work on `s'
    System.out.println (s);
}

with the compiler-checked code:

// constructed generic type
List<String> list = new ArrayList<String> ();
list.add ("foo");
list.add (42); // error: cannot find symbol: method add(int)
for (String s : list)
    System.out.println (s);

The C# equivalent code is nigh identical:

IList<string> list = new List<string> ();
list.Add ("foo");
list.Add (42); // error CS1503: Cannot convert from `int' to `string'
foreach (string s in list)
    Console.WriteLine (s);

Terminology

A Generic Type is a type (classes and interfaces in Java and C#, as well as delegates and structs in C#) that accepts Generic Type Parameters. A Constructed Generic Type is a Generic Type with Generic Type Arguments, which are Types to actually use in place of the Generic Type Parameters within the context of the Generic Type.

For simple generic types, Java and C# have identical syntax for declaring and using Generic Types:

class GenericClass<TypeParameter1, TypeParameter2>
{
    public static void Demo ()
    {
        GenericClass<String, Object> c = 
            new GenericClass<String, Object> ();
    }
}

In the above, GenericClass is a Generic Type, TypeParameter1 and TypeParameter2 are Generic Type Parameters for GenericClass, and GenericClass<String, Object> is a Constructed Generic Type with String as a Generic Type Argument for the TypeParameter1 Generic Type Parameter, and Object as the Generic Type Argument for the TypeParameter2 Generic Type Parameter.

It is an error in C# to create a Generic Type without providing any Type Arguments. Java permits creating Generic Types without providing any Type Arguments; these are called raw types:

Map rawMap = new HashMap <String, String> ();

Java also permits you to leave out Generic Type Arguments from the right-hand-side. Both raw types and skipping Generic Type Arguments elicit a compiler warning:

Map<String, String> correct = new HashMap<String, String> ();
    // no warning, lhs matches rhs
Map<String, String> incorrect = new HashMap ();
    // lhs doesn't match rhs; generates the warning:
    //  Note: gen.java uses unchecked or unsafe operations.
    //  Note: Recompile with -Xlint:unchecked for details.

Compiling the above Java code with -Xlint:unchecked produces:

gen.java:9: warning: [unchecked] unchecked conversion
found   : java.util.HashMap
required: java.util.Map<java.lang.String,java.lang.String>
                Map<String, String> incorrect = new HashMap ();

Note that all "suspicious" code produces warnings, not errors, under Java. Only provably wrong code generate compiler errors (such as adding an Integer to a List<String>).

(Also note that "suspicious" code includes Java <= 1.4-style use of collections, i.e. all collections code that predates Java 5.0. This means that you get lots of warnings when migrating Java <= 1.4 code to Java 5.0 and specifying -Xlint:unchecked.)

Aside from the new use of `<', `>', and type names within constructed generic type names, the use of generic types is essentially identical to the use of non-generic types, though Java has some extra flexibility when declaring variables.

Java has one added wrinkle as well: static methods of generic classes cannot reference the type parameters of their enclosing generic class. C# does not have this limitation:

class GenericClass<T> {
    public static void UseGenericParameter (T t) {}
        // error: non-static class T cannot be 
        // referenced from a static context
}

class Usage {
    public static void UseStaticMethod () {
        // Valid C#, not valid Java
        GenericClass<int>.UseGenericParameter (42);
    }
}

Generic Methods

Java and C# both support generic methods, in which a (static or instance) method itself accepts generic type parameters, though they differ in where the generic type parameters are declared. Java places the generic type parameters before the method return type:

class NonGenericClass {
    public static <T> T max (T a, T b) {/*...*/}
}

while C# places them after the method name:

class NonGenericClass {
    static T Max<T> (T a, T b) {/*...*/}
}

Generic methods may exist on both generic- and non-generic classes and interfaces.

Constraints

What can you do with those Generic Type Parameters within the class or method body? Not much:

• Declare variables using the generic type parameter in most nested scopes (e.g. instance class member, method parameter, local variable).
• Invoke methods that exist on java.lang.Object (Java) or System.Object (C#).
• Assign the default value to variables with the generic parameter type. The default value is null in Java, and default(Generic Type Parameter) in C#. (C# requires this syntax because null isn't a valid value for value types such as int.)

class GenericJavaClass<T> {
    T[] arrayMember  = null;
    T   singleMember = null;

    public static void Demo ()
    {
        T localVariable = 42; // error
        T localVariable2 = null;

        AcceptGenericTypeParameter (localVariable);
    }

    public static void AcceptGenericTypeParameter (T t)
    {
        System.out.println (t.toString ()); // ok
        System.out.println (t.intValue ()); 
            // error: cannot find symbol
    }
}

class GenericCSharpClass<T> {
    T[] arrayMember  = null;
    T   singleMember = default(T);

    public static void Demo ()
    {
        T localVariable  = 42; // error
        T localVariable2 = default(T);

        AcceptGenericTypeParameter (localVariable);
    }

    public static void AcceptGenericTypeParameter (T t)
    {
        System.out.println (t.ToString ());     // ok
        System.out.println (t.GetTypeCode ());  // error: cannot find symbol
    }
}

So how do we call non-Object methods on objects of a generic type parameter?

1. Cast the variable to a type that has the method you want (and accept the potentially resulting cast-related exceptions).
2. Place a constraint on the generic type parameter. A constraint is a compile-time assertion that the generic type argument will fulfill certain obligations. Such obligations include the base class of the generic type argument, any implemented interfaces of the generic type argument, and (in C#) whether the generic type argument's type has a default constructor, is a value type, or a reference type.

Java Type Constraints

Java type and method constraints are specified using a "mini expression language" within the `<' and `>' declaring the generic type parameters. For each type parameter that has constraints, the syntax is:

TypeParameter ListOfConstraints

Where ListOfConstraints is a `&'-separated list of one of the following constraints:

• Specifying a base class or implemented interface on the Generic Type Argument by using: extends BaseOrInterfaceType

(`&' must be used instead of `,' because `,' separates each generic type parameter.)

The above constraints also apply to methods, and methods can use some additional constraints described below.

class GenericClass<T extends Number & Comparable<T>> {
    void print (T t) {
        System.out.println (t.intValue ()); // OK
    }
}

class Demo {
    static <U, T extends U>
    void copy (List<T> source, List<U> dest) {
        for (T t : source)
            dest.add (t);
    }

    static void main (String[] args) {
        new GenericClass<Integer>().print (42);
            // OK: Integer extends Number
        new GenericClass<Double>().print (3.14159);
            // OK: Double extends Number
        new GenericClass<String>().print ("string");
            // error: <T>print(T) in gen cannot be applied 
            //  to (java.lang.String)

        ArrayList<Integer> ints = new ArrayList<Integer> ();
        Collections.addAll (ints, 1, 2, 3);
        copy (ints, new ArrayList<Object> ());
            // OK; Integer inherits from Object
        copy (ints, new ArrayList<String> ());
            // error: <U,T>copy(java.util.List<T>,
            //  java.util.List<U>) in cv cannot be 
            //  applied to (java.util.ArrayList<java.lang.Integer>,
            //  java.util.ArrayList<java.lang.String>)
    }
}

C# Constraints

C# generic type parameter constraints are specified with the context-sensitive where keyword, which is placed after the class name or after the method's closing `)'. For each type parameter that has constraints, the syntax is:

where TypeParameter : ListOfConstraints

Where ListOfConstraints is a comma-separated list of one of the following constraints:

• Specifying inheritance relationships, such as a mandatory base class or interface by listing the type name or another generic type parameter.
• Requiring that the type argument be a value type by specifying struct.
• Requiring that the type argument be a reference type by using class.
• Requiring that the type argument provide a default constructor by using new().

class GenericClass<T> : IComparable<GenericClass<T>>
    where T : IComparable<T>
{
    private GenericClass () {}

    void Print (T t)
    {
        Console.WriteLine (t.CompareTo (t));
            // OK; T must implement IComparable<T>
    }

    public int CompareTo (GenericClass<T> other)
    {
        return 0;
    }
}

class Demo {
    static void OnlyValueTypes<T> (T t) 
        where T : struct
    {
    }

    static void OnlyReferenceTypes<T> (T t) 
        where T : class
    {
    }

    static void Copy<T, U> (IEnumerable<T> source, 
            ICollection<U> dest)
        where T : U, IComparable<T>, new()
        where U : new()
    {
        foreach (T t in source)
            dest.Add (t);
    }

    static T CreateInstance<T> () where T : new()
    {
        return new T();
    }

    public static void Main (String[] args)
    {
        new GenericClass<int>.Print (42);
            // OK: Int32 implements IComparable<int>
        new GenericClass<double>.Print (3.14159);
            // OK: Double implements IComparable<double>
        new GenericClass<TimeZone>.Print (
            TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone);
            // error: TimeZone doesn't implement 
            //  IComparable<TimeZone>

        OnlyValueTypes (42);    // OK: int is a struct
        OnlyValueTypes ("42");
            // error: string is a reference type

        OnlyReferenceTypes (42);
            // error: int is a struct
        OnlyReferenceTypes ("42");  // OK

        CreateInstance<int> ();
            // OK; int has default constructor
        CreateInstance<GenericClass<int>> ();
            // error CS0310: The type `GenericClass<int>' 
            //  must have a public parameterless constructor
            //  in order to use it as parameter `T' in the 
            //  generic type or method 
            //  `Test.CreateInstance<T>()'

        // In theory, you could do `Copy' instead of 
        // `Copy<...>' below, but it depends on the 
        // type inferencing capabilities of your compiler.
        Copy<int,object> (new int[]{1, 2, 3}, 
            new List<object> ());
            // OK: implicit int -> object conversion exists.
        Copy<int,AppDomain> (new int[]{1, 2, 3}, 
            new List<AppDomain> ());
            // error CS0309: The type `int' must be 
            //  convertible to `System.AppDomain' in order 
            //  to use it as parameter `T' in the generic 
            //  type or method `Test.Copy<T,U>(
            //      System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<T>, 
            //      System.Collections.Generic.ICollection<U>)'
    }
}

Java Wildcards (Java Method Constraints)

Java has additional support for covarient- and contravariant generic types on method declarations.

By default, you cannot assign an instance of one constructed generic type to an instance of another generic type where the generic type arguments differ:

// Java, though s/ArrayList/List/ for C#
List<String> stringList = new ArrayList<String> ();
List<Object> objectList = stringList; // error

The reason for this is quite obvious with a little thought: if the above were permitted, you could violate the type system:

// Assume above...
stringList.add ("a string");
objectList.add (new Object ());
// and now `stringList' contains a non-String object!

This way leads madness and ClassCastExceptions. :-)

However, sometimes you want the flexibility of having different generic type arguments:

static void cat (Collection<Reader> sources) throws IOException {
    for (Reader r : sources) {
        int c;
        while ((c = r.read()) != -1)
            System.out.print ((char) c);
    }
}

Many types implement Reader, e.g. StringReader and FileReader, so we might want to do this:

Collection<StringReader> sources = 
    new Collection<StringReader> ();
Collections.addAll (sources, 
    new StringReader ("foo"), 
    new StringReader ("bar"));
cat (sources);
// error: cat(java.util.Collection<java.io.Reader>) 
//  in gen cannot be applied to 
//  (java.util.Collection<java.io.StringReader>)

There are two ways to make this work:

1. use Collection<Reader> instead of Collection<StringReader>:

   Collection<Reader> sources = new Collection<Reader> ();
   Collections.addAll (sources, 
       new StringReader ("foo"), 
       new StringReader ("bar"));
   cat (sources);

2. Use wildcards.

Unbounded Wildcards

If you don't care about the specific generic type arguments involved, you can use `?' as the type parameter. This is an unbounded wildcard, because the `?' can represent anything:

static void printAll (Collection<?> c) {
    for (Object o : c)
        System.out.println (o);
}

The primary utility of unbounded wildcards is to migrate pre-Java 5.0 collection uses to Java 5.0 collections (thus removing the probably thousands of warnings -Xlint:unchecked produces) in the easiest manner.

This obviously won't help for cat (above), but it's also possible to "bind" the wildcard, to create a bounded wildcard.

Bounded Wildcards

You create a bounded wildcard by binding an upper- or lower- bound to an unbounded wildcard. Upper bounds are specified via extends, while lower bounds are specified via super. Thus, to allow a Collection parameter that accepts Reader instances or any type that derives from Reader:

static void cat (Collection<? extends Reader> c) 
    throws IOException
{
    /* as before */
}

This permits the more desirable use:

Collection<StringReader> sources = 
    new Collection<StringReader> ();
Collections.addAll (sources, 
    new StringReader ("foo"), 
    new StringReader ("bar"));
cat (sources);

Bounded wildcards also allow you to reduce the number of generic parameters you might otherwise want/need a generic method; compare this Demo.copy to the previous Java Demo.copy implementation:

class Demo {
    static <T> void copy (List<? extends T> source, 
        List<? super T> dest)
    {
        for (T t : source)
            dest.add (t);
    }
}

C# Equivalents

C# has no direct support for bounded or unbounded wildcards, and thus doesn't permit declaring class- or method-level variables that make use of them. However, if you can make the class/method itself generic, you can create equivalent functionality.

A Java method taking an unbounded wildcard would be mapped to a generic C# method with one generic type parameter for each unbound variable within the Java method:

static void PrintAll<T> (IEnumerable<T> list) {
    foreach (T t in list) {
        Console.WriteLine (t);
    }
}

This permits working with any type of IEnumerable<T>, e.g. List<int> and List<string>.

A Java method taking an upper bounded wildcard can be mapped to a generic C# method with one generic type parameter for each bound variable, then using a derivation constraint on the type parameter:

static void Cat<T> (IList<T> sources)
    where T : Stream
{
    for (Stream s : sources) {
        int c;
        while ((c = r.ReadByte ()) != -1)
            Console.Write ((char) c);
    }
}

A Java method taking a lower bounded wildcard can be mapped to a generic C# method taking two generic type parameters for each bound variable (one is the actual type you care about, and the other is the super type), then using a derivation constraint between your type variables:

static void Copy<T,U> (IEnumerable<T> source, 
        ICollection<U> dest)
    where T : U
{
    foreach (T t in source)
        dest.Add (t);
}

Generics Implementation

How Java and C# implement generics has a significant impact on what generics code can do and what can be done at runtime.

Java Implementation

Java Generics were originally designed so that the .class file format wouldn't need to be changed. This would have meant that Generics-using code could run unchanged on JDK 1.4.0 and earlier JDK versions.

However, the .class file format had to change anyway (for example, generics permits you to overload methods based solely on return type), but they didn't revisit the design of Java Generics, so Java Generics remains a compile-time feature based on Type Erasure.

Sadly, you need to know what type erasure is in order to actually write much generics code.

With Type Erasure, the compiler transforms your code in the following manner:

1. Generic types (classes and interfaces) retain the same name, so you cannot have a generic class Foo and a non-generic Foo<T> in the same package -- these are the same type. This is the raw type.
2. All instances of generic types become their corresponding raw type. So a List<String> becomes a List. (Thus all "nested" uses of generic type parameters -- in which the generic type parameter is used as a generic type argument of another generic type -- are "erased".)
3. All instances of generic type parameters in both class and method scope become instances of their closest matching type:
   • If the generic type parameter has an extends constraint, then instances of the generic type parameter become instances of the specified type.
   • Otherwise, java.lang.Object is used.
4. Generic methods also retain the same name, and thus there cannot be any overloading of methods between those using generic type parameters (after the above translations have occurred) and methods not using generic type parameters (see below for example).
5. Runtime casts are inserted by the compiler to ensure that the runtime types are what you think they are. This means that there is runtime casting that you cannot see (the compiler inserts the casts), and thus generics confer no performance benefit over non-generics code.

For example, the following generics class:

class GenericClass<T, U extends Number> {
    T tMember;
    U uMember;

    public T getFirst (List<T> list) {
        return list.get (0);
    }

    // in bytecode, this is overloading based on return type
    public U getFirst (List<U> list) {
        return list.get (0);
    }

    //
    // This would be an error -- doesn't use generic type parameters
    // and has same raw argument list as above two methods:
    // 
    //  public Object getFirst (List list) {
    //      return list.get (0);
    //  }
    //

    public void printAll (List<U> list) {
        for (U u : list) {
            System.out.println (u);
        }
    }
}

Is translated by the compiler into the equivalent Java type:

class GenericClass {
    Object tMember;
    Number uMember; // as `U extends Number'

    public Object getFirst (List list) {
        return list.get (0);
    }

    public Number getFirst (List list) {
        // note cast inserted by compile