Setting properties via object initialization or not: Any difference?

Question

Is there any (performance) difference between this:

Person person = new Person()
{
  Name = "Philippe",
  Mail = "[email protected]",
};

and this:

Person person = new Person();
person.Name = "Philippe";
person.Mail = "[email protected]";

You can imagine a bigger object with more properties.

Answer 1

They are almost exactly equivalent except that the first method (using an object initializer) only works in C# 3.0 and newer. Any performance difference is only minor and not worth worrying about.

They produce almost identical IL code. The first gives this:

.method private hidebysig instance void ObjectInitializer() cil managed
{
    .maxstack 2
    .locals init (
        [0] class Person person,
        [1] class Person <>g__initLocal0)
    L_0000: newobj instance void Person::.ctor()
    L_0005: stloc.1 
    L_0006: ldloc.1 
    L_0007: ldstr "Philippe"
    L_000c: callvirt instance void Person::set_Name(string)
    L_0011: ldloc.1 
    L_0012: ldstr "[email protected]"
    L_0017: callvirt instance void Person::set_Mail(string)
    L_001c: ldloc.1 
    L_001d: stloc.0 
    L_001e: ldloc.0 
    L_001f: callvirt instance string [mscorlib]System.Object::ToString()
    L_0024: pop 
    L_0025: ret 
}

The second gives this:

.method private hidebysig instance void SetProperties() cil managed
{
    .maxstack 2
    .locals init (
        [0] class Person person)
    L_0000: newobj instance void Person::.ctor()
    L_0005: stloc.0 
    L_0006: ldloc.0 
    L_0007: ldstr "Philippe"
    L_000c: callvirt instance void Person::set_Name(string)
    L_0011: ldloc.0 
    L_0012: ldstr "[email protected]"
    L_0017: callvirt instance void Person::set_Mail(string)
    L_001c: ldloc.0 
    L_001d: callvirt instance string [mscorlib]System.Object::ToString()
    L_0022: pop 
    L_0023: ret 
}

As you can see, nearly identical code is generated. See below for the exact C# code I compiled.

Performance measurements show very similar results with a very small performance improvement for using the object initializer syntax:

Method               Iterations per second
ObjectInitializer    8.8 million
SetProperties        8.6 million

Code I used for testing the performance:

using System;

class Person
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Mail { get; set; }
}

class Program
{
    private void ObjectInitializer()
    {
        Person person = new Person()
        {
            Name = "Philippe",
            Mail = "[email protected]",
        };
        person.ToString();
    }

    private void SetProperties()
    {
        Person person = new Person();
        person.Name = "Philippe";
        person.Mail = "[email protected]";
        person.ToString();
    }

    private const int repetitions = 100000000;

    private void Time(Action action)
    {
        DateTime start = DateTime.UtcNow;
        for (int i = 0; i < repetitions; ++i)
        {
            action();
        }
        DateTime end = DateTime.UtcNow;
        Console.WriteLine(repetitions / (end - start).TotalSeconds);
    }

    private void Run()
    {
        Time(ObjectInitializer);
        Time(SetProperties);
        Console.WriteLine("Finished");
        Console.ReadLine();
    }

    private static void Main()
    {
        new Program().Run();
    }
}