The Stack is an Implementation Detail

I have a confession. When .NET and C# beta came out in 1999, I was confused by the definition of struct as a “value type” allocated on the stack and class as a “reference type” allocated on the heap. We were told structs are lean and fast while classes are heavy and slow. I distinctly recall searching for every imaginable opportunity to use the struct keyword. I further recall being confused by the statement that everything in C# is passed by value and by the ref and out keywords. I used ref whenever I wanted to modify values in a formal parameter regardless of whether they were structs or classes. What I didn’t realize at the time was that ref and out are really just an explicit use of a pointer. Ref and provide a mechanism to manipulate a value type by pointer instead of manipulating a local copy. For reference types, though, using ref and out is the moral equivalent of using a pointer-to-pointer in C and it is rarely necessary or correct.

Eric Lippert has a could of blog posts about how the stack is an implementation detail and not really the point of value types at all. He flat-out stays that the guidance about stacks and heaps is useless and confusing. The point of value types is that they are always copied by value rather than just having another variable point (refer) to the same memory as with a reference type. They just happen to be placed on the stack because they can.

Along the way he explains why you can’t capture a ref value type in a closure.