Structs

A value type that encapsulates data and related functionality.

Characteristics

• Allocation: Stack
• Equality: Value (albeit inefficient)
• Semantics: Value (a variable of a struct type contains an instance of that type)
• Inheritance: None (sealed)
• Mutability: Mutable (but, recommended to be made immutable with readonly modifier)

Use When

• You need a small, data-centric type with little or no behavior
• You need a type whose fields are only value types
• The total bytes used by all the fields in the type is 16 bytes or less
• .NET uses structs for numbers, booleans, unicode chars, time.

Creating

Note: When creating custom structs, always override ToString() to provide information about the type (not shown here).

public struct Point 
{
    public double X { get; }
    public double Y { get; }
    public Point(double x, double y) => (X, Y) = (x, y);

    public override string ToString() => $"({X}, {Y})";
}

Initialization

Uninitialized fields are assigned their default value.

If all instance fields of a struct are accessible, the struct can be instantiated without the new operator.

Creating Objects

Point p1 = new Point(5, 7);

readonly struct

The readonly modifier declares a structure immutable:

public readonly struct Point P { … }

If the struct is declared readonly, then:

1. All fields must also be readonly
2. All properties must be readonly (no set accessor) or init-only (get, init accessors)

readonly instance members

Instead of declaring an entire struct immutable, you may declare some members immutable to indicate that they do not modify the state of the struct:

public readonly double Sum() => return X + Y;
public readonly override string ToString() => $"({X}, {Y})";

Nondestructive mutation

Use the with expression to mutate immutable properties or fields of a struct instance. This creates a copy of th struct with the properties/fields modified:

var p1 = new Point(0, 0);
var p2 = p1 with { X = 1, Y = 3 };

Conversions

All structs, except ref structs, have boxing and unboxing conversions to/from System.ValueType and System.Object.