[throwaway2037]

    It also gives you more control over memory allocations than Java

Cool! I didn't know about this. Can you share an example? It might foster some good discussion. I haven't written any serious C# in about 10 years now. I still love that language. To me, it's like Java with all the rough edges sanded down. In that era, Visual Studio was the only choice for dev and needed the IntelliJ plug-in. I always thought that was a bit goofy, but nothing against the language itself. And, the COM+ integration is legendary if you need to run on Win32.

[zigzag312]

Value types have gained more functionality in recent versions.

You can quickly create record structs or value tuples (that auto-implement Equals(obj) & GetHashCode()) and pass them around by reference instead of copying.

  record struct RGBA(byte R, byte G, byte B, byte A);

  // allocate a small collection on the stack
  Span<RGBA> colors = stackalloc RGBA[3]
  {
      new RGBA(255, 0, 0, 255),
      new RGBA(0, 255, 0, 255),
      new RGBA(0, 0, 255, 255)
  };

  // get value by reference
  ref var c = ref colors[2]; 
  c = new RGBA(127, 127, 127, 255); 
  
  // prints: RGBA { R = 127, G = 127, B = 127, A = 255 }
  Console.WriteLine(colors[2]); 

  // value tuple
  (byte R, byte G, byte B, byte A) white = (255,255,255,255);

Heap allocated generic collections of value types have better data locality than collections of reference types.

Ref struct is a type of struct that is always stack allocated and cannot be promoted to the managed heap or boxed. `Span<T>` is ref struct.

Spans allow you to create views over contiguous regions of memory that is located on the stack or on the heap or over native memory. You can pass spans to methods that then read/modify the data in the view.

And many other features that help you manage memory or avoid allocations.

For example. When working with interfaces you can avoid boxing allocation of value types by using a generic type constrained to the interface instead of the interface.

[merb]

c# has structs and span, which makes memore allocation more easy. in java the thing gets easier as well (soon) but java still has no value types and than there is sun.misc.Unsafe which is still a special case and a really really old api, in jdk 19 some new apis were introduced which lifts some of these stuff like panama preview and a new vector api.