C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0 High Performance

Boxing and unboxing overhead

The boxing and unboxing methods are not always good to use and they negatively impact the performance of mission-critical applications. Boxing is a method of converting a value type to an object type, and is done implicitly, whereas unboxing is a method of converting an object type back to a value type and requires explicit casting.

Let's go through an example where we have two methods executing a loop of 10 million records, and in each iteration, they are incrementing the counter by 1. The AvoidBoxingUnboxing method is using a primitive integer to initialize and increment it on each iteration, whereas the BoxingUnboxing method is boxing by assigning the numeric value to the object type first and then unboxing ...