✅ Struct Fields
Is there a reason to mask two values into a single field on a struct, e.g. if I want a
struct MyValue with fields ushort A and ushort B, is there any value in having the struct internally store the value as uint _c? I formerly thought since this was one field it was better because everyone says to generally not use a struct with a lot of fields, but based on some reading I have done it seems that maybe this is treated in memory the same way since those two ushort fields are side-by-side and effectively storing two ushort fields would be no different except that I wouldn't have to manually unmask A and B from _c in my getters.7 Replies
my guess is that it will perform the same, but you should benchmark it
there is no value storing 2 side by side
ushorts in an uint because they consume the same amount of memory and are both properly aligned
the "dont use a struct with a lot of fields" doesnt matter in this case
the amount of fields doesnt really matter, the size of the struct matters more, for example 16x byte fields technically would be fine because it only consumes 16 bytes of memory
generally you should keep struct size max 16 bytesBecause that is the size of
nint?IIRC it's a pretty arbitrary number which materialized itself as a good rough idea of the size after which a struct might end up performing worse
Due to copying by value instead of reference
and if you pass structs around by reference, it doesn't mean anything
Indeed
So it's just a rough estimate mostly
Was this issue resolved? If so, run
/close - otherwise I will mark this as stale and this post will be archived until there is new activity.