Clarification on migration to value types and boxed vs unboxed representations

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 6 January 2015 at 01:58, Vitaly Davidovich <vitalyd at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mutable structs aren't used all that often in c# but there are times when
> they're very useful.

When I've thought about this, the first use case for mutable I came up
with was property objects. These allow code like:

class Person {
  public final Property<Strring> surname;
}
String surname = person.surname.get();
person.surname.set("MySurname");
Property<String> p = person.surname;

Here, Property is a mutable wrapper around the surname, hence the
get() and set(). Today, this design is only suitable for the client
side, as creating all the wrapper objects creates far too much garbage
and churn for a server (tried it, was a car crash).

However, despite the appeal of making this work via value types, I'm
willing to agree that allowing mutability would have far too many
otehr negative consequences. Thus I agree with the "only immutable"
design direction.

Stephen