IEnumerable.OrderBy should detect TKey parameters that are not IComparable.

[TonyValenti]

Hi All!
It would be really great if the signature for Linq's Enumerable.OrderBy was updated such that TKey had to implement IComparable. The same is true regarding ThenBy. This would make it possible to catch certain errors at compile time rather than run time.

[Clockwork-Muse]

Obligatory first note: Breaking change, and thus unlikely.

The reason this likely wasn't done is because of OrderBy<TSource,TKey> (this System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable source, Func<TSource,TKey> keySelector, System.Collections.Generic.IComparer comparer) - this allows the ordering to be called on things that don't implement IComparable, because there are any number of things that don't have any "natural" sort order (person, country, bank account, etc). The other methods then just call this one with a supplied default.

And while it would be nice to catch this at compile time, this is an area that absolutely should have test coverage in consumer code, meaning it should be caught at build time, not caught by users in deployed code.

[TonyValenti]

@Clockwork-Muse -
There are a lot of overloads of each. I think the overload you mentioned would be safe to ignore the constraint.

[eiriktsarpalis]

Triage: as already mentioned, this is a breaking change. However it might make sense to add a Roslyn analyzer for detecting this.