How are C# Generics implemented?

Question

I had thought that Generics in C# were implemented such that a new class/method/what-have-you was generated, either at run-time or compile-time, when a new generic type was used, similar to C++ templates (which I've never actually looked into and I very well could be wrong, about which I'd gladly accept correction).

But in my coding I came up with an exact counterexample:

static class Program {
    static void Main()
    {
        Test testVar = new Test();

        GenericTest<Test> genericTest = new GenericTest<Test>();
        int gen = genericTest.Get(testVar);

        RegularTest regTest = new RegularTest();
        int reg = regTest.Get(testVar);

        if (gen == ((object)testVar).GetHashCode())
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Got Object's hashcode from GenericTest!");
        }
        if (reg == testVar.GetHashCode())
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Got Test's hashcode from RegularTest!");
        }
    }

    class Test
    {
        public new int GetHashCode()
        {
            return 0;
        }
    }

    class GenericTest<T>
    {
        public int Get(T obj)
        {
            return obj.GetHashCode();
        }
    }

    class RegularTest
    {
        public int Get(Test obj)
        {
            return obj.GetHashCode();
        }
    }
}

Both of those console lines print.

I know that the actual reason this happens is that the virtual call to Object.GetHashCode() doesn't resolve to Test.GetHashCode() because the method in Test is marked as new rather than override. Therefore, I know if I used "override" rather than "new" on Test.GetHashCode() then the return of 0 would polymorphically override the method GetHashCode in object and this wouldn't be true, but according to my (previous) understanding of C# generics it wouldn't have mattered because every instance of T would have been replaced with Test, and thus the method call would have statically (or at generic resolution time) been resolved to the "new" method.

So my question is this: How are generics implemented in C#? I don't know CIL bytecode, but I do know Java bytecode so I understand how Object-oriented CLI languages work at a low level. Feel free to explain at that level.

As an aside, I thought C# generics were implemented that way because everyone always calls the generic system in C# "True Generics," compared to the type-erasure system of Java.

Answer 1

In GenericTest<T>.Get(T), the C# compiler has already picked that object.GetHashCode should be called (virtually). There's no way this will resolve to the "new" GetHashCode method at runtime (which will have its own slot in the method-table, rather than overriding the slot for object.GetHashCode).

From Eric Lippert's What's the difference, part one: Generics are not templates, the issue is explained (the setup used is slightly different, but the lessons translate well to your scenario):

This illustrates that generics in C# are not like templates in C++. You can think of templates as a fancy-pants search-and-replace mechanism.[...] That’s not how generic types work; generic types are, well, generic. We do the overload resolution once and bake in the result. [...] The IL we’ve generated for the generic type already has the method its going to call picked out. The jitter does not say “well, I happen to know that if we asked the C# compiler to execute right now with this additional information then it would have picked a different overload. Let me rewrite the generated code to ignore the code that the C# compiler originally generated...” The jitter knows nothing about the rules of C#.

And a workaround for your desired semantics:

Now, if you do want overload resolution to be re-executed at runtime based on the runtime types of the arguments, we can do that for you; that’s what the new “dynamic” feature does in C# 4.0. Just replace “object” with “dynamic” and when you make a call involving that object, we’ll run the overload resolution algorithm at runtime and dynamically spit code that calls the method that the compiler would have picked, had it known all the runtime types at compile time.