Code inspection: Member can be made static (shared) (private accessibility)

Consider the method Print below:

  public class Foo
  {
    public void Test()
    {
      Print("John");
    }

    private void Print(string name)
    {
      Console.WriteLine("Hello, {0}!", name);
    }
  }
            

Public Class Foo
    Public Sub Test()
        Print("John")
    End Sub

    Private Sub Print(name As String)
        Console.WriteLine("Hello, {0}!", name)
    End Sub
End Class
            

JetBrains Rider suggests that Print has no instance usages and can be made static. But what’s the point? Well, as it turns out, static members yield a small performance benefit under particular circumstances.

Here’s what the Microsoft documentation has to say about it:

- Members that do not access instance data or call instance methods can be marked as static (Shared in Visual Basic). After you mark the methods as static, the compiler will emit non-virtual call sites to these members. Emitting nonvirtual call sites will prevent a check at runtime for each call that makes sure that the current object pointer is non-null. This can achieve a measurable performance gain for performance-sensitive code. In some cases, the failure to access the current object instance represents a correctness issue.

Last modified: 11 February 2024