Why doesn't the CLR always call value type constructors

Question

I have a question concerning type constructors within a Value type. This question was inspired by something that Jeffrey Richter wrote in CLR via C# 3rd ed,

Answer 1

This is crazy-by-design behavior of "beforefieldinit" attribute in MSIL. It affects C++/CLI too, I filed a bug report where Microsoft very nicely explained why the behavior is the way it is and I pointed out multiple sections in the language standard that didn't agree / need to be updated to describe the actual behavior. But it's not publicly viewable. Anyway, here's the final word on it from Microsoft (discussing a similar situation in C++/CLI):

Since we're invoking the standard here, the line from Partition I, 8.9.5 says this:

If marked BeforeFieldInit then the type’s initializer method is executed at, or sometime before, first access to any static field defined for that type.

That section actually goes into detail about how a language implementation can choose to prevent the behavior you're describing. C++/CLI chooses not to, rather they allow the programmer to do so if they wish.

Basically, since the code below has absolutely no static fields, the JIT is completely correct in simply not invoking static class constructors.

The same behavior is what you're seeing, although in a different language.