Member-only story
Start Using ValueTuple: Senior Developer’s POV
Class Overhead in .NET Development and solution
4 min readJan 6, 2025
In .NET development, achieving both efficiency and readability has always been in a major role. Classes have been a reliable choice for structuring data right? but they come with some trade-offs.
Enter ValueTuple
, a newer, lightweight data structure that’s changing the way we code and this article explores the transition from traditional classes to ValueTuple
, explaining why it’s a key tool for senior developers who want top-notch performance and maintainable code.
Traditional Classes and Their Overheads
Classes in .NET have long been the go-to for representing complex data structures. However, their usage comes with inherent costs:
- Heap Allocation: Classes are reference types so it leads to frequent heap allocations and eventual garbage collection overhead jeezzz…
- Boxing/Unboxing Issues: When dealing with value types stored in classes, implicit boxing can introduce performance penalties!!
- Boilerplate Code: Classes often require verbose implementations, including constructors,
Equals
,GetHashCode
, and `ToString` methods, just to handle simple scenarios (it sounds but…)