Overview
This chapter looks at various aspects of
memory management and memory access. Although the runtime takes
much of the responsibility for memory management away from the
programmer, it is useful to understand how memory management works
and important to know how to work with unmanaged resources
efficiently.
If you have a good understanding of memory
management and knowledge of the pointer capabilities provided by
C#, you are also better positioned to integrate C# code with legacy
code and perform efficient memory manipulation in
performance-critical systems.
Specifically, this chapter discusses:
-
How the runtime allocates space on the stack
and the heap
-
How garbage collection works
-
How to use destructors and the System.IDisposable interface to ensure unmanaged
resources are released correctly
-
The syntax for using pointers in C#
-
How to use pointers to implement
high-performance stack-based arrays
