consider following class
public class A
{
int gh;
int dk;
int fg;
int gha;
int dkd;
int fgf;
}
and then class
public class B
{
public A m_p1=null;
public A m_p2=null;
public A m_p3=null;
}
What will be the byte size of class B? Will it be three pointers, or, three times the size of class A?.
You really don't have any guarantees about what the CLR will do with your class. There's a very good explanation of that here
If you want to know how much unmanaged memory a class or struct will take up if you need to interop, you can use Marshal.SizeOf().
What will be the byte size of class B? Will it be three pointers, or, three times the size of class A?.
More importantly, why does this matter to you? What are you actually trying to solve?
If you want to know how much unmanaged memory a class or struct will take up if you need to interop, you can use Marshal.SizeOf().
Clr Via C# is a good source for this kind of question.
It's relevant to know what kind of size are you talking about?
The consumption of class variables in memory?
The size of the class itself? (Inlucding memory tables(Methods,meta data) and meta data(used by reflection))
For your direct question:
It depends what you're asking. The physical size of the class will be three pointers because A is enscapulated as a pointer under a C# reference.
If you ask for overall size, it will the size of B + 3 times the size of A.
Some performance counters and matrices state the later while some will give you direct answer for the former.
WinDBG is a great tool to check that kind of sizes.
Mr. Petrie is more correct than I am as he took into account per instance overhead and used the term reference instead of pointer. One example of per instance overhead would be the type of the object. (if I'm not mistaken that is)
