c# - Why is List.Sort() an instance method but Array.Sort() static?

Question

I'm trying to understand the design decision behind this part of the language. I admit i'm very new to it all but this is something which caught me out initially and I was wondering if I'm missing an obvious reason. Consider the following code:

List<int> MyList = new List<int>() { 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 };
int[] MyArray = {5,4,3,2,1};


//Sort the list
MyList.Sort();
//This was an instance method


//Sort the Array
Array.Sort(MyArray);
//This was a static method

Why are they not both implemented in the same way - intuitively to me it would make more sense if they were both instance methods?

Answer 1

The question is interesting because it reveals details of the .NET type system. Like value types, string and delegate types, array types get special treatment in .NET. The most notable oddish behavior is that you never explicitly declare an array type. The compiler takes care of it for you with ample helpings of the jitter. System.Array is an abstract type, you'll get dedicated array types in the process of writing code. Either by explicitly creating a type[] or by using generic classes that have an array in their base implementation.

In a largish program, having hundreds of array types is not unusual. Which is okay, but there's overhead involved for each type. It is storage required for just the type, not the objects of it. The biggest chunk of it is the so-called 'method table'. In a nutshell, it is a list of pointers to each instance method of the type. Both the class loader and the jitter work together to fill this table. This is commonly known as the 'v-table' but isn't quite a match, the table contains pointers to methods that are both non-virtual and virtual.

You can see where this leads perhaps, the designers were worried about having lots of types with big method tables. So looked for ways to cut down on the overhead.

Array.Sort() was an obvious target.

The same issue is not relevant for generic types. A big nicety of generics, one of many, one method table can handle the method pointers for any type parameter of a reference type.