A single slot always occupies the same flattened index, so filling,
clearing, or replacing it moves no other child -- only the new child's own
index needs setting. The generated single-slot setters now pass that index
to SetChildNode (a compile-time constant when no collection precedes the
slot; SetChild forwards its argument), which assigns childIndex directly and
never invalidates -- mirroring the IL AST's SetChildInstruction(ref, value,
index). Previously a set-from-null could not know the index here and fell
back to invalidating, forcing a later O(children) EnsureChildIndices rebuild.
With the indices now kept current by construction, NextSibling/PrevSibling
inline the validity check and skip the (non-inlinable) EnsureChildIndices
call in the overwhelmingly common already-valid case.
Together these idle the renumber machinery on a System.Private.CoreLib
decompile: EnsureChildIndices calls 53.4M -> 1.6M, actual rebuilds
1.97M -> 183K, elements renumbered 3.40M -> 757K. Output is byte-identical
and the Pretty suite stays green with CheckInvariant validating the
directly-assigned indices after every transform.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-8:Claude Code
Siegfried Pammer
9212387e3d