Method prologues
Let’s take a look at the definition of the Vector3::ToString() method. Specifically, it has a common prologue that is
emitted in all methods by il2cpp.exe.
StackTraceSentry _stackTraceSentry(&Vector3_ToString_m2315_MethodInfo);
static bool Vector3_ToString_m2315_init;
if (!Vector3_ToString_m2315_init)
{
ObjectU5BU5D_t4_il2cpp_TypeInfo_var = il2cpp_codegen_class_from_type(&ObjectU5BU5D_t4_0_0_0);
Vector3_ToString_m2315_init = true;
}
The first line of this prologue creates a local variable of type StackTraceSentry. This variable is used to track the
managed call stack, so that IL2CPP can report it in calls like Environment.StackTrace. Code generation of this entry is
actually optional, and is enabled in this case by the --enable-stacktrace option passed to il2cpp.exe
(since I set Enable Exceptions option in the WebGL Player Settings to Full). For small functions,
we found that the overhead of this variable has a negative impact on performance. So for iOS and other platforms where
we can use platform-specific stack trace information, we never emit this line into generated code. For WebGL,
we don’t have platform-specific stack trace support, so it is necessary to allow managed code exceptions to work properly.
The second part of the prologue does lazy initialization of type metadata for any array or generic types used in the
method body. So the name ObjectU5BU5D_t4 is the name of the type System.Object[]. This part of the prologue is only
executed once and often does nothing if the type was already initialized elsewhere, so we have not seen any adverse
performance implications from this generated code.
Is this code thread safe though? What if two threads call Vector3::ToString() at the same time? Actually, this code is not problematic,
since all of the code in the libil2cpp runtime used for type initialization is safe to call from multiple threads. It is possible (maybe even likely)
that il2cpp_codegen_class_from_type function will be called more than once, but the actual work it does will only occur once, on one thread. Method
execution won’t continue until that initialization is complete. So this method prologue is thread safe.
