Managing Memory with Reference and Value Types
Explore how C# handles memory management by differentiating reference and value types. Understand how stack and heap memory are allocated and the impact on application performance and design. This lesson helps you grasp essential concepts for efficient coding and debugging in C#.
Let’s look at reference types in detail. There are two categories of memory: stack memory and heap memory. The stack and heap can be anywhere in physical or virtual memory with modern operating systems.
Stack and heap
Stack memory is faster to work with (because it is managed directly by the CPU and because it uses a last-in, first-out mechanism, it is more likely to have data in its L1 or L2 cache) but limited in size, while heap memory is slower but much more plentiful.
On Windows, for ARM64, x86, and x64 machines, the default stack size is