Well, now getting deeper into the facts, lets talk about how objects are created in .NET and how type system is laid out in memory for this post in my
Internals Series. As this is going to be very deep dive post, I would recommend to read this only if you want to kill your time to know the internal details of .NET runtime and also you have considerable working experience with the CLR types and type system.
Recently I have been talking with somebody regarding the actual difference between the C++ type system and managed C# type system. I fact the CLR Type system is different from the former as any object (not a value type) is in memory contains a baggage of information when laid out in memory. This makes CLR objects considerable different from traditional C++ programs.
Classification of Types
In .NET there are mainly two kind of Types.
- Value Types (derived from System.ValueType)
- Reference Type (derived directly from System.Object)
Even though ValueTypes are internally inherited from System.Object in its core, but CLR treats them very differently. Indeed from your own perception the
Value Types are actually allocated in stacks (occationally) while reference types are allocated in Heaps. This is to reduce the additional contension of GC heaps for Heap allocation, GC cycles, occasional call to OS for additional memory needs etc. The object that is allocated in managed Heap is called Managed Object and the pointer that is allocated in stack to refer to the actual object in heap is called
Object Reference (which is sometimes called as Managed Pointer).