Tony Hoare, the computer scientist who implemented null references in ALGOL calls it his “billion-dollar mistake.”

I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

It may well be that a billion is a vast underestimate. But if you’re going to make a mistake, might as well go big. Respect!

To this day, we pay the price with tons of boilerplate code. For example, it’s generally good practice to add guard clauses for each potentially null parameter to a public method.

public void SomeMethod(object x, object y) {
  // Guard clauses
  if (x == null)
    throw new ArgumentNullException("x");
  if (y == null)
    throw new ArgumentNullException("y");

  // Rest of the method...
}

While it may feel like unnecessary ceremony, Jon Skeet gives some good reasons why guard clauses like this are a good idea in this StackOverflow answer:

Yes, there are good reasons:

  • It identifies exactly what is null, which may not be obvious from a NullReferenceException
  • It makes the code fail on invalid input even if some other condition means that the value isn’t dereferenced
  • It makes the exception occur before the method could have any other side-effects you might reach before the first dereference
  • It means you can be confident that if you pass the parameter into something else, you’re not violating theircontract
  • It documents your method’s requirements (using Code Contracts is even better for that of course)

I agree. The guard clauses are needed, but it’s time for some Real Talk™. This is shit work. And I hate shit work.

In this post,

  • I’ll explain the idea of non-nullable parameters and why I didn’t use CodeContracts in the hopes that heads off the first 10 comments asking “why didn’t you use CodeContracts dude?”
  • I’ll cover an approach using PostSharp to automatically validate null arguments.
  • I’ll then explain how I hope to create an even better approach.

Stick with me.

Non Null Parameters

With .NET languages such as C#, there’s no way to prevent a caller of a method from passing in a null value to a reference type argument. Instead, we simply end up having to validate the passed in arguments and ensure they’re not null.

In practice (at least with my code), the number of times I want to allow a null value is far exceeded by the number of times a null value is not valid. What I’d really like to do is invert the model. By default, a parameter cannot be null unless I explicitly say it can. In other words, make allowing null opt-in rather than opt-out as it is today.

I recall that there was some experimentation around this by Microsoft with the Spec# language that introduced a syntax to specify that a value cannot be null. For example…

public void Foo(string! arg);

…defines the argument to the method as a non-nullable string. The idea is this code would not compile if you attempt to pass in a null value for arg. It’s certainly not a trivial change as Craig Gidney writes in this post. He covers many of the challenges in adding a non-nullable syntax and then goes further to provide a proposed solution.

C# doesn’t have such a syntax, but it does have Code Contracts. After reading up on it, I really like the idea, but for me it suffers from one fatal flaw. There’s no way to apply a contract globally and then opt-out of it in specific places. I still have to apply the Contract calls to every potentially null argument of every method. In other words, it doesn’t satisfy my requirement to invert the model and make allowing null opt in rather than opt out. It’s still shit work. It’s also error-prone and I’m too lazy a bastard to get it right in every case.

IL Rewriting to the Rescue

So I figured I’d go off the deep end and experiment with Intermediate Language (IL)weaving with PostSharp to insert guard clauses automatically. Usually, any time I think about rewriting IL, I take a hammer to my head until the idea goes away. A few good whacks is plenty. However in this case, I thought it’d be a fun experiment to try. Not to mention I have a very hard head.

I chose to use PostSharp because it’s easy to get started with and it provides a simple, but powerful, API. It does have a few major downsides for what I want to accomplish that I’ll cover later.

I wrote an aspect, EnsureNonNullAspect, that you apply to a method, a class, or an assembly that injects on null checks for all public arguments and return values in your code. You can then opt out of the null checking using the AllowNullAttribute.

Here’s some examples of usage:

using NullGuard;

[assembly: EnsureNonNullAspect]

public class Sample 
{
    public void SomeMethod(string arg) {
        // throws ArgumentNullException if arg is null.
    }

    public void AnotherMethod([AllowNull]string arg) {
        // arg may be null here
    }

    public string MethodWithReturn() {
        // Throws InvalidOperationException if return value is null.
    }
   
    // Null checking works for automatic properties too.
    public string SomeProperty { get; set; }

    [AllowNull] // can be applied to a whole property
    public string NullProperty { get; set; }

    public string NullProperty { 
        get; 
        [param: AllowNull] // Or just the setter.
        set; 
}

For more examples, check out the automated tests in the NullGuard GitHub repository.

By default, the attribute only works for public properties, methods, and constructors. It also validates return values, out parameters, and incoming arguments.

If you need more fine grained control of what gets validated, the EnsureNonNullAspect accepts a ValidationFlags enum. For example, if you only want to validate arguments and not return values, you can specify: [EnsureNonNullAspect(ValidationFlags.AllPublicArguments)].

Downsides

This approach requires that the NullGuard and PostSharp libraries are redistributed with the application. Also, the generated code is a bit verbose. Here’s an example of the generated code of a previously one line method.

Another downside is that you’ll need to install the PostSharp Visual Studio extension and register for a license before you can fully use my library. The license for the free community edition is free, but it does add a bit of friction just to try this out.

I’d love to see PostSharp add support for generating IL that’s completely free of dependencies on the PostSharp assemblies. Perhaps by injecting just enough types into the rewritten assembly so it’s standalone.

Try it!

To try this out, install the NullGuard.PostSharp package from NuGet.  (It’s a pre-release library so make sure you include preleases when you attempt to install it).

Install-Package NullGuard.PostSharp IncludePrelease

Make sure you also install the PostSharp Visual Studio extension.

When you install the NuGet package into a project, it should modify that project to use PostSharp. If not, you’ll need to add an MSBuild task to run PostSharp against your project. Just look at Tests.csproj file in the NullGuard repository for an example.

If you just want to see things working, clone the NullGuard repository and run the unit tests.

File an issue if you have ideas on how to improve it or anything that’s wonky.

Alternative Approaches and What’s Next?

NullGuard.PostSharp is really an experiment. It’s my first iteration in solving this problem. I think it’s useful in its current state, but there are much better approaches I want to try.

  • Use Fody to write the guard blocks. Fody is an IL Weaver tool written by Simon Cropp that provides an MSBuild task to rewrite IL. The benefit of this approach is there is no need to redistribute parts of Fody with the application. The downside is Fody is much more daunting to use as compared to PostSharp. It leverages Mono.Cecil and requires a decent understanding of IL. Maybe I can convince Simon to help me out here. In the meanwhile, I better start reading up on IL. I think this will be the next approach I try. UPDATE: Turns out that in response to this blog post, the Fody team wrote NullGuard.Fody that does exactly this!
  • Use T4 to rewrite the source code. Rather than rewrite the IL, another approach would be to rewrite the source code much like T4MVC does with T4 Templates. One benefit of this approach is I could inject code contracts and get all the benefits of having them declared in the source code. The tricky part is doing this in a robust manner that doesn’t mess up the developer’s workflow.
  • Use Roslyn. It seems to me that Roslyn should be great for this. I just need to figure out how exactly I’d incorporate it. Modify source code or update the IL?
  • Beg the Code Contracts team to address this scenario. Like the Temptations, I ain’t too proud to beg.

Yet another alternative is to embrace the shit work, but write an automated test that ensures every argument is properly checked. I started working on a method you could add to any unit test suite that’d verify every method in an assembly, but it’s not done yet. It’s a bit tricky.

If you have a better solution, do let me know. I’d love for this to be handled by the language or Code Contracts, but right now those just don’t cut it yet.