performance of byte vs. int in .NET

Question

In pre-.NET world I always assumed that int is faster than byte since this is how processor works.

Now it's matter habit of using int even when bytes could work, for example when byte is what is stored in database

Question: How .NET handles byte type versus int from point view of performance/memory.

Update: Thanks for the input. Unfortunately, nobody really answered the question. How .NET handles byte vs. int.

And if there is no difference in performance, then I like how chills42 put it: int for arithmetics bytes for binary Which I will continue to do.

Answer 1

Your pre-.NET assumption were faulty -- there have always been plenty of computer systems around that, while nominally "byte-addressable", would have to set a single byte by reading a full word, masking it out to alter the one byte of it, write it all down -- slower than just setting a full word. It depends on the internals of the way the processor and memory are connected, not on the programmer-visible architecture.

Whether in .NET or native code, focus first on using the data as semantically correct for your application, not on trying to double guess the computer system's architect -- "Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming", to quote Knuth quoting Hoare.