Ref returns and ref locals

"Ref returns" are the subject of another great question from StackOverflow that I thought I might share with a larger audience.

Ever since C# 1.0 you've been able to create an "alias" to a variable by passing a "ref to a variable" to certain methods:

static void M(ref int x)
{
    x = 123;
}
...
int y = 456;
M(ref y);

Despite their different names, "x" and "y" are now aliases for each other; they both refer to the same storage location. When x is changed, y changes too because they are the same thing. Basically, "ref" parameters allow you to pass around variables as variables rather than as values. This is a sometimes-confusing feature (because it is easy to confuse "reference types" with "ref" aliases to variables,) but it is generally a pretty well-understood and frequently-used feature.

However, it is a little-known fact that the CLR type system supports additional usages of "ref", though C# does not. The CLR type system also allows methods to return refs to variables, and allows local variables to be aliases for other variables. The CLR type system however does not allow for fields that are aliases to other variables. Similarly arrays may not contain managed references to other variables. Both fields and arrays containing refs are illegal because making it legal would overly complicates the garbage collection story. (I also note that the "managed reference to variable" types are not convertible to object, and therefore may not be used as type arguments to generic types or methods. For details, see the CLI specification Partition I Section 8.2.1.1, "Managed pointers and related types" for information about this feature.)

As you might expect, it is entirely possible to create a version of C# which supports both these features. You could then do things like

static ref int Max(ref int x, ref int y)
{
  if (x > y)
    return ref x;
  else
    return ref y;
}

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