Struct vs. Class in .NET

Lately, I've made a very important mistake while using structs in our persistency system(save/load game). So I wanted to write this post, which may help others, especially Unity developers. Since they mostly use C# in their programs.

So what is the difference between a struct and a class? Everybody should and probably do know by heart that, struct is a value type and class is a reference type in C#. The things is most people do not know what this means and what are the effects. I am going to give some examples to explain these effects.

The new keyword. You can create a struct without using the new keyword, but then you need to assign all of the fields manually

struct MyStruct
{
	public int a;
}
MyStruct myStruct;
myStruct.a = 1; // Don't do this and you are going to get a compile error

If you use the new keyword, then the fields will be assigned to their default values. (e.g. 0 for int)

Extension methods for structs won't modify the actual object

public static void UpdateA(this MyStruct ms)
{
	ms.a += 1; // The passed ms object's field 'a' is still 1, remember pass by value
}

Still a result of being a value type, you should be careful with recursion

public static MyStruct RecursiveA(MyStruct ms)  
{  
	ms.a += 1;
	if (ms.a < 10)
	{
		RecursiveA(ms);
	}
	return ms;
}

ms = RecursiveA(ms);

The function above will still terminate when ms.a is 10 but the value of the actual ms.a will be 1. You can solve this problem by using a class of course or you can assign ms inside the function like this.

public static MyStruct RecursiveA(MyStruct ms)  
{  
	ms.a += 1;
	if (ms.a < 10)
	{
		ms = RecursiveA(ms);
	}
	return ms;
}

If you use the ref keyword, the struct will be passed by reference(its location in memory)

public static MyStruct RecursiveA(ref MyStruct ms)  
{  
	ms.a += 1;
	if (ms.a < 10)
	{
		RecursiveA(ref ms);
	}
	return ms;
}
// When this terminates the value of ms.a will be 10
RecursiveA(ref ms);

Conclusion

I think it is clear that a mutable struct is not a good idea. They are good for storing read-only data. Whenever you need mutable data, you should use a class instead of a struct.

If you think that this blog post is wrong or missing, please send me a message.