Alternatives to Activator.CreateInstance - when milliseconds matter!

Hello World!

Let me open this post with this beautiful quote:

“Time felt slower when we do nothing but wait.” 
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

On one such occasion, while waiting for a program to do what it should, I thought of analyzing the performance through Red Gate's ANTS memory profiler and it showed that a significant bit of time was being spent in creating types in a reflective manner using Activator.CreateInstance. A quick Google for alternatives yielded some results that were nothing short of an eye opener for me! So this is sort of a "post-it" for myself and peers of various ways the community has come up with.


I. Roger Alsing's LINQ way: as explained in his post here

This methodology makes use of an ObjectCreator delegate like so:

delegate T ObjectActivator<T>(params object[] args);

Once you implement the delegate as demonstrated by Roger, the invocation is pretty simple to read:

ConstructorInfo ctor = typeof(Created).GetConstructors().First();
ObjectActivator<Created> createdActivator = GetActivator<Created>(ctor);
...
//create an instance:
Created instance = createdActivator (123, "Roger");

II. Robert Jan Boeije's extension method on System.Type as explained in his post here
His way is using the power of compiled lambda expressions. (// TODO: something to learn)
When you have this extension method in place, the call to create a new instance is as simple as this:

return typeof(T).New<T>(value);

That's it!

III. Something similar by Steve Wilkes with performance statistics and insightful comments here

IV. Dean Oliver on CodeProject - Using the DynamicMethod class in the Reflection namespace
Demonstrated here
Here, Dean uses IL.Emit to optimize creation of instances. //TODO: read on how IL emit works!

V. Andrew Rissing on CodeProject: here
Again, the magic is lambda expressions and the Func<> delegate

Whoa! I guess that's enough for now!
In summary, the lesson learnt for me is that no more Activator.CreateInstance in my code!

Happy Coding!