Warning produced by f#: value has been copied to ensure the original is not mutated

Question

The first definition below produces the warning in the title when compiled with f# 3.0 and the warning level set to 5. The second definition compiles cleanly. I wondered if someone could please explain just what the compiler worries I might accidentally mutate, or how would splitting the expression with a let clause help avoid that. Many thanks.

let ticks_with_warning () : int64 =
   System.DateTime.Now.Ticks 

let ticks_clean () : int64 =
   let t = System.DateTime.Now
   t.Ticks 

Answer 1

I cannot really explain why the compiler emits this warning in your particular case - I agree with @ildjarn that you can safely ignore it, because the compiler is probably just being overly cautious.

However, I can give you an example where the warning might actually give you a useful hint that something might not go as you would expect. If we had a mutable struct like this:

[<Struct>]
type Test =
  val mutable ticks : int64
  member x.Inc() = x.ticks <- x.ticks + 1L
  new (init) = { ticks = init }

Now, the Inc method mutates the struct (and you can also access the mutable field ticks). We can try writing a function that creates a Test value and mutates it:

let foo () =
  let t = Test(1L)
  t.Inc()  // Warning: The value has been copied to ensure the original is not mutated
  t

We did not mark the local value t as mutable, so the compiler tries to make sure the value is not mutated when we call Inc. It does not know whether Inc mutates the value or not, so the only safe thing is to create a copy - and thus foo returns the value Test(1L).

If we mark t as mutable, then the compiler does not have to worry about mutating it as a result of a call and so it does not give the warning (and the function returns Test(2L)):

let foo () =
  let mutable t = Test(1L)
  t.Inc()
  t

I'm not really sure what is causing the warning in your example though. Perhaps the compiler thinks (as a result of some intermediate representation) that Ticks operation could mutate the left-hand-side value (System.DateTime.Now and t respectively) and it wants to prevent that.

The odd thing is that if you write your own DateTime struct in F#, you get a warning in both cases unless you mark the variable t as mutable (which is what I'd expect), but the behaviour with standard DateTime is different. So perhaps the compiler knows something about the standard type that I'm missing...