Boxing Day

Sugar, sugar

Suppose you have a list of items you want to iterate over and do something for each item in C#. Also suppose you want to avoid any heap allocations while doing so, therefore fancy list extensions using lambda expressions are out of question. So you write something like this:

Which is syntactic sugar for:

Which, in turn, is syntactic sugar for:

Sweet, sweet syntactic sugar! Profiling confirms that that last piece of code generates zero GC alloc, if list is of type System.Collections.Generic.List<T>. So all is well, right? Wrong! Both the foreach loop and the second version with explicit using block generate 48 bytes of garbage. So why is that?


There is a small but important lie in the code transformations above: the var keyword. The only reason why that third snippet generates zero garbage is because List<T> implements a custom enumerator which is a struct. Structs are stack allocated and gets passed by value, meaning they are copied every time they get passed around as a function parameter or a return value. So zero heap allocation.

But the foreach pattern does not know what it gets. It expects an IEnumerator<T> out of the GetEnumerator() call. And even though List<T>.Enumerator implements IEnumerator<T> a boxing conversion happens as soon as you write something like this:

Why? I don’t know. Bug, oversight, or feature? I don’t know. Does it happen for all versions of .NET? I don’t know. However, I do know that it happens in all versions of Unity released to this date, and that is bad enough for me.

Also note that the same behavior is true for the using block which expects an IDisposable. Additionally a using block also emits a null check before disposing of the disposable, which of course doesn’t make any sense for a struct either.

So bottom line neither the foreach statement nor the using block can take advantage of having a struct instead of a class getting passed to them.


I tend to use a plain T[] array instead of a List<T> whenever possible. If I have to use a list, I tend to use old school indexer loops to iterate over them:

To iterate over collections like HashSet<T> or Dictionary<K,V> I use the following pattern:

It isn’t quite as succinct as the foreach loop but almost. The for loop syntax with empty increment statement might feel weird at first. The worst part is that the code never disposes of the enumerator. Therefore it’s borderline dangerous or simply wrong. But then again, as far as I know, for these collections there is nothing to dispose of anyway.


C# compiles an iterator block using yield statements into an inner class implementing IEnumerator. Jon Skeet writes about iterator blocks in great detail. Note that it generates an inner class, not an inner struct! Therefore there is no further cost for boxing involved but GetEnumerator() itself already allocates memory on the heap.

Why did they choose to implement it like this? I don’t know. But the implementation does adhere to the design guidelines for choosing between class and struct. More specifically the enumerator implementing the iterator block neither is immutable, nor necessarily smaller than 16 bytes, nor logically represents a single value, and most likely it will be used in a pattern requiring boxing anyway.

Funny though that they chose to implement collection enumerators as structs, since those violate at least two or three of the four characteristics as well…