Professional .NET 2.0 Generics

Chapter 11. Under the Hood

If you're going to be working with generics, you're also likely to have some interest in understanding how they're managed by the CLR. This chapter looks at all the inner workings of generic types. It examines how generic types are instantiated at run-time, how they're represented in IL, and how the CLR attempts to optimize their size and performance. It also explores some of the key motivating factors that influenced the overall design characteristics employed as part of the .NET generics implementation. The chapter wraps up by looking at some of the performance gains that can be achieved through the use of generics. By the time you reach the end, you should have a much better feeling for the underlying concepts that directly influence how you go about creating and consuming generics.