Why is the new Tuple type in .Net 4.0 a reference type (class) and not a value type (struct)

Question

Does anyone know the answer and/or have an opinion about this?

Since tuples would normally not be very large, I would assume it would make more sense to use structs than classes for these. What say you?

Answer 1

Microsoft made all tuple types reference types in the interests of simplicity.

I personally think this was a mistake. Tuples with more than 4 fields are very unusual and should be replaced with a more typeful alternative anyway (such as a record type in F#) so only small tuples are of practical interest. My own benchmarks showed that unboxed tuples up to 512 bytes could still be faster than boxed tuples.

Although memory efficiency is one concern, I believe the dominant issue is the overhead of the .NET garbage collector. Allocation and collection are very expensive on .NET because its garbage collector has not been very heavily optimized (e.g. compared to the JVM). Moreover, the default .NET GC (workstation) has not yet been parallelized. Consequently, parallel programs that use tuples grind to a halt as all cores contend for the shared garbage collector, destroying scalability. This is not only the dominant concern but, AFAIK, was completely neglected by Microsoft when they examined this problem.

Another concern is virtual dispatch. Reference types support subtypes and, therefore, their members are typically invoked via virtual dispatch. In contrast, value types cannot support subtypes so member invocation is entirely unambiguous and can always be performed as a direct function call. Virtual dispatch is hugely expensive on modern hardware because the CPU cannot predict where the program counter will end up. The JVM goes to great lengths to optimize virtual dispatch but .NET does not. However, .NET does provide an escape from virtual dispatch in the form of value types. So representing tuples as value types could, again, have dramatically improved performance here. For example, calling GetHashCode on a 2-tuple a million times takes 0.17s but calling it on an equivalent struct takes only 0.008s, i.e. the value type is 20× faster than the reference type.

A real situation where these performance problems with tuples commonly arises is in the use of tuples as keys in dictionaries. I actually stumbled upon this thread by following a link from the Stack Overflow question F# runs my algorithm slower than Python! where the author's F# program turned out to be slower than his Python precisely because he was using boxed tuples. Manually unboxing using a hand-written struct type makes his F# program several times faster, and faster than Python. These issues would never had arisen if tuples were represented by value types and not reference types to begin with...

Answer 2

The reason is most likely because only the smaller tuples would make sense as value types since they would have a small memory footprint. The larger tuples (i.e. the ones with more properties) would actually suffer in performance since they would be larger than 16 bytes.

Rather than have some tuples be value types and others be reference types and force developers to know which are which I would imagine the folks at Microsoft thought making them all reference types was simpler.

Ah, suspicions confirmed! Please see Building Tuple:

The first major decision was whether to treat tuples either as a reference or value type. Since they are immutable any time you want to change the values of a tuple, you have to create a new one. If they are reference types, this means there can be lots of garbage generated if you are changing elements in a tuple in a tight loop. F# tuples were reference types, but there was a feeling from the team that they could realize a performance improvement if two, and perhaps three, element tuples were value types instead. Some teams that had created internal tuples had used value instead of reference types, because their scenarios were very sensitive to creating lots of managed objects. They found that using a value type gave them better performance. In our first draft of the tuple specification, we kept the two-, three-, and four-element tuples as value types, with the rest being reference types. However, during a design meeting that included representatives from other languages it was decided that this "split" design would be confusing, due to the slightly different semantics between the two types. Consistency in behavior and design was determined to be of higher priority than potential performance increases. Based on this input, we changed the design so that all tuples are reference types, although we asked the F# team to do some performance investigation to see if it experienced a speedup when using a value type for some sizes of tuples. It had a good way to test this, since its compiler, written in F#, was a good example of a large program that used tuples in a variety of scenarios. In the end, the F# team found that it did not get a performance improvement when some tuples were value types instead of reference types. This made us feel better about our decision to use reference types for tuple.