Manual memory management requires developers to manage the allocation and de-allocation of blocks of memory. Manual memory management is both time consuming and difficult. C# provides automatic memory management so that developers are freed from this burdensome task. In the vast majority of cases, this automatic memory management increases code quality and enhances developer productivity without negatively impacting either expressiveness or performance.
The example
using System; public class Stack { private Node first = null; public bool Empty { get { return (first == null); } } public object Pop() { if (first == null) throw new Exception("Can't Pop from an empty Stack."); else { object temp = first.Value; first = first.Next; return temp; } } public void Push(object o) { first = new Node(o, first); } class Node { public Node Next; public object Value; public Node(object value): this(value, null) {} public Node(object value, Node next) { Next = next; Value = value; } } }
shows a Stack
class implemented as a linked list of Node
instances. Node instances are created in the Push
method and are garbage collected when no longer needed. A Node
instance becomes eligible for garbage collection when it is no longer possible for any code to access it. For instance, when an item is removed from the Stack
, the associated Node
instance becomes eligible for garbage collection.
The example
class Test { static void Main() { Stack s = new Stack(); for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) s.Push(i); while (!s.Empty) Console.WriteLine(s.Pop()); } }
shows a test program that uses the Stack
class. A Stack
is created and initialized with 10 elements, and then assigned the value null
. Once the variable s
is assigned null, the Stack
and the associated 10 Node
instances become eligible for garbage collection. The garbage collector is permitted to clean up immediately, but is not required to do so.
For developers who are generally content with automatic memory management but sometimes need fine-grained control or that extra iota of performance, C# provides the ability to write "unsafe" code. Such code can deal directly with pointer types, and fix objects to temporarily prevent the garbage collector from moving them. This "unsafe" code feature is in fact "safe" feature from the perspective of both developers and users. Unsafe code must be clearly marked in the code with the modifier unsafe, so developers can't possibly use unsafe features accidentally, and the C# compiler and the execution engine work together to ensure that unsafe code cannot masquerade as safe code.
The example
using System; class Test { unsafe static void WriteLocations(byte[] arr) { fixed (byte *p_arr = arr) { byte *p_elem = p_arr; for (int i = 0; i < arr.Length; i++) { byte value = *p_elem; string addr = int.Format((int) p_elem, "X"); Console.WriteLine("arr[{0}] at 0x{1} is {2}", i, addr, value); p_elem++; } } } static void Main() { byte[] arr = new byte[] {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}; WriteLocations(arr); } }
shows an unsafe method named WriteLocations
that fixes an array instance and uses pointer manipulation to iterate over the elements and write out the index, value, and location of each. One possible output of the program is:
arr[0] at 0x8E0360 is 1 arr[1] at 0x8E0361 is 2 arr[2] at 0x8E0362 is 3 arr[3] at 0x8E0363 is 4 arr[4] at 0x8E0364 is 5
but of course the exact memory locations are subject to change.