How to crash the .NET common language runtime (CLR) in pure .net

Question

There is a similar question targeting the Java VM but I haven't found a question for .net (please close and mark as duplicate if I was missing something).

So - is it possible without nasty unmanaged interop? And with crashing I mean a real "xxx.exe has stopped working" not a StackOverflow- or OutOfMemoryException.

I think it is not possible, except when hitting a bug in the VM itself.

Answer 1

Without the need to use unsafe code or delegates (also if i must admit it is a very nice way to crash your CLR), you can use simple Marshal functions to force .NET to crash.

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace Crash
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            IntPtr p = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(1);
            for (int i = 0; i < 10000000; ++i)
            {
                p = new IntPtr(p.ToInt64() + 1);
                Marshal.WriteByte(p, 0xFF);
            }
        }
    }
}

Also this, using always GCHandle, will cause a memory access violation like error.

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace Crash
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            GCHandle.FromIntPtr(new IntPtr(32323));
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

I've done that just today. I was testing a setup of a larger .net project. There was missing an assembly containing some interfaces and the exe just stops working. No exception was caught by the runtime.

You can be sure that there a even more bugs in the runtime - just count the millions of lines of code ...