Size of an empty class in C#

Question

Hi Guys, Can anyone tell me what will be the size of the empty class ( Memory consumed ) in C# ?? If this is the case , class Sample { public static void main ( String args[]) { } }

Jignesh Trivedi · Answer

hi, I think, If you create object on dos/ windows 64 bit environment, the size of empty class will be 1 becoz the sizeof() function return atleast 1 byte. it is never zero. in other os it might be 2 or 4 byte. In C++ context please refer http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/why-is-the-size-of-an-empty-class-not-zero-in-c/ hope this will help you.

Vulpes · Answer

First of all, when you talk about the size of an empty class I assume that you mean the size of an instance of an empty class even though you're not actually creating one in your example code. In .NET, every instance of a class is allocated on the managed heap and consists of two parts - overhead and data. The size of the overhead is 8 bytes on a 32 bit system and 16 bytes on a 64 bit system. The size of the data part is the sum of the bytes required by the individual instance fields of the class plus any padding needed for memory alignment purposes. Even if there are no instance fields, for technical reasons there still needs to be a way to point into the data part. The CLR therefore allocates an additional byte which, for memory alignment reasons, will be effectively increased to 4 bytes on a 32 bit system and 8 bytes on a 64 bit system. Consequently, an empty class instance will occupy a total of 12 bytes on a 32 bit system or 24 bytes on a 64 bit system.

Hemant Srivastava · Answer

Above link is related to size of a class in C++ instead of c#. Actually you can't get actual size of a class using 'sizeof' in C# as we used to do in C++. Following link give explaination for this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2331889/how-to-find-the-size-of-a-class-in-c-sharp

Iftikar Hussain · Answer

Hi, Please refer the below link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f42z47h2.aspx Regards, Iftikar