Performance Intermezzo
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, one benefit of generic types is their allegedly better performance profile. An underlying problem also mentioned earlier in this chapter is the excessive boxing that occurs when storing value types using the most applicable type in .NET: System.Object.
Note: What About Boxing in Other Platforms?
.NET’s capability to treat value types and reference types in the same manner is a side effect of its unified type system design philosophy. It allows all languages to think in terms of a single type hierarchy, abstracting away seemingly irrelevant differences between various kinds of types: Everything is a System.Object in the end.
Other platforms, such as Java, did not go that far ...
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