Can anyone explain this strange behavior with signed floats in C#?

Question

Here is the example with comments:

class Program
{
    // first version of structure
    public struct D1
    {
        public double d;
        public int f         


        

Answer 1

The bug is in the following two lines of System.ValueType: (I stepped into the reference source)

if (CanCompareBits(this)) 
    return FastEqualsCheck(thisObj, obj);

(Both methods are [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.InternalCall)])

When all of the fields are 8 bytes wide, CanCompareBits mistakenly returns true, resulting in a bitwise comparison of two different, but semantically identical, values.

When at least one field is not 8 bytes wide, CanCompareBits returns false, and the code proceeds to use reflection to loop over the fields and call Equals for each value, which correctly treats -0.0 as equal to 0.0.

Here is the source for CanCompareBits from SSCLI:

FCIMPL1(FC_BOOL_RET, ValueTypeHelper::CanCompareBits, Object* obj)
{
    WRAPPER_CONTRACT;
    STATIC_CONTRACT_SO_TOLERANT;

    _ASSERTE(obj != NULL);
    MethodTable* mt = obj->GetMethodTable();
    FC_RETURN_BOOL(!mt->ContainsPointers() && !mt->IsNotTightlyPacked());
}
FCIMPLEND