Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

Performance Differences

A lot of times value types store data directly, whereas reference types store only the address of the data. Although you can create and consume types according to your needs, there are some concerns with performance, particularly regarding methods. Methods can accept parameters, also known as arguments. Arguments can be value types or reference types. If you pass a value type to a method, you pass to that method all the data contained in the value type, which could be time-consuming and cause performance overhead. Passing a reference type passes only the address to the data, so it could be faster and more efficient. There could be situations in which you need to pass one or more value types to methods. What you pass depends ...