Is relying on && short-circuiting safe in .NET?

Assume myObj is null. Is it safe to write this?

if(myObj != null && myObj.SomeString != null)

I know some languages won't execute the second expression because the && evaluates to false before the second part is executed.

Solution 1:

Yes. In C# && and || are short-circuiting and thus evaluates the right side only if the left side doesn't already determine the result. The operators & and | on the other hand don't short-circuit and always evaluate both sides.

The spec says:

The && and || operators are called the conditional logical operators. They are also called the “shortcircuiting” logical operators.
...
The operation x && y corresponds to the operation x & y, except that y is evaluated only if x is true
...
The operation x && y is evaluated as (bool)x ? (bool)y : false. In other words, x is first evaluated and converted to type bool. Then, if x is true, y is evaluated and converted to type bool, and this becomes the result of the operation. Otherwise, the result of the operation is false.

(C# Language Specification Version 4.0 - 7.12 Conditional logical operators)

One interesting property of && and || is that they are short circuiting even if they don't operate on bools, but types where the user overloaded the operators & or | together with the true and false operator.

The operation x && y is evaluated as T.false((T)x) ? (T)x : T.&((T)x, y), where T.false((T)x) is an invocation of the operator false declared in T, and T.&((T)x, y) is an invocation of the selected operator &. In addition, the value (T)x shall only be evaluated once.

In other words, x is first evaluated and converted to type T and operator false is invoked on the result to determine if x is definitely false.
Then, if x is definitely false, the result of the operation is the value previously computed for x converted to type T.
Otherwise, y is evaluated, and the selected operator & is invoked on the value previously computed for x converted to type T and the value computed for y to produce the result of the operation.

(C# Language Specification Version 4.0 - 7.12.2 User-defined conditional logical operators)

Solution 2:

Yes, C# uses logical short-circuiting.

Note that although C# (and some other .NET languages) behave this way, it is a property of the language, not the CLR.

Solution 3:

I know I'm late to the party, but in C# 6.0 you can do this too:

if(myObj?.SomeString != null)

Which is the same thing as above.

Also see: What does question mark and dot operator ?. mean in C# 6.0?

Solution 4:

Your code is safe - && and || are both short-circuited. You can use non-short-circuited operators & or |, which evaluate both ends, but I really don't see that in much production code.