A chain of type forwarders is followed by assembly name, and every name resolves relative
to the assembly being decompiled - so a chain that leaves for another framework can be
pulled straight back into the directory it started in. A .NET Standard 2.0 assembly
sitting among .NET Framework 4.6.1 facades lost System.Linq.Enumerable that way: the
chain went netstandard -> System.Core (from the shared framework) -> System.Linq (back to
the input directory) -> netstandard, arriving at an assembly it had already passed
through. Nothing in the closure defines the type, so it stayed unknown and every LINQ
call decompiled as a static call with a delegate cast.
Once the closure is loaded, chains that return to an assembly they already visited are
walked a second time, resolving each hop next to the assembly that forwards it. The
assembly ending the repaired chain is loaded only once it is confirmed to declare the
type; it then wins the deduplication against the assembly of the same name it displaces,
which version order says nothing about. An assembly that neither forwards nor declares
the type ends the walk with nothing loaded, so a failed repair cannot displace anything.
Only chains that are already broken are walked twice. Preferring the forwarder's own
directory as a resolution policy was tried first and rejected: measured against a corpus,
it moved a .NET 8 facade's System.Runtime reference out of a net4x compilation, splitting
type identities so that overrides printed as virtual. The two cases cannot be told apart
where references are resolved, because that layer sees assembly names, not the type whose
chain is or is not terminating.
AssemblyReference now knows the module that declares it, which is what lets a hop be
resolved next to its forwarder, and its metadata reader is that module's.
A chain that cannot be repaired is reported in the reference load log the UI already
shows, once per reference: a facade forwards hundreds of types and they all fail together.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5:Claude Code
On FIPS-mode systems the platform crypto provider refuses to create
SHA-1 instances (OpenSSL: error:03000098 invalid digest), so merely
displaying a strong-named assembly's identity failed. The public-key
token is a non-secret identity hash whose algorithm is fixed by
ECMA-335, so the two token sites now use dotnet/runtime's managed
Sha1ForNonSecretPurposes, vendored with its license header intact and
shielded from the repo formatter via generated_code in .editorconfig
so future upstream syncs diff cleanly. IncrementalHash was considered
and rejected: like SHA1.Create(), it resolves the digest through the
host crypto policy, and Roslyn's equivalent token code also relies on
the platform SHA-1, so it offers no precedent for FIPS safety.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5:Claude Code
DecompilerTypeSystem uses this to resolve/load multiple assemblies in parallel.
Unfortunately this doesn't gain us any performance yet in ILSpy because there we have a global assembly-loader-lock :(
Siegfried Pammer
ds5678
Christoph Wille
Peter Crabtree
James May
Daniel Grunwald
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dotnet format
dymanoid
Andrew Au