Advantages of boxing

[Sonam Goenka]

Hello friends,

The Object oriented programming comprises quit complicated concept. And one of them is "Boxing". I think the "Boxing" concept is entirely different from the tape casting. I don't have enough knowledge about the boxing. If you know then please let know someadvantages of boxing concept from the object oriented programming. It will be great you gives any suitable example for this concept.

[opaper]

Boxing concept of the OOPs is useful to create a reference type, on the heap, that contains the boxed value and a type code. So, there's the modest cost of allocation and the modest cost of copying data. Boxing is converting a value-type to reference type. An example is converting an integer value to an object value. If the boxing operation is being performed on a value type that is declared within your code, remove the structure, and use an object type instead.

[MindSpace]

Boxing a of the value type is used to allocates an object instance on the heap and copies the value into the new object. if you are using a value type (struct) declared outside of your code (such as an integer, string, boolean, etc.) you generally cannot eliminate the boxing operation. Boxing is used to store value types in the garbage-collected heap. Boxing is an implicit conversion of a value type to the type object or to any interface type implemented by this value type.

[Modifier]

The advantage of boxing is that you can pass, say, an integer around as an object. Secondarily, you can have data structures that can hold any type of value, like an object[] or 1.x's ArrayList and HashTable.Boxing a value type allocates an object instance on the heap and copies the value into the new object. The advantage of unboxing is you get you native integer performance back.It also possible to perform the boxing explicitly as in the following example, but explicit boxing is never required.

[Praetor]

The boxing operation creates a copy of the value of the integer to the object. Objects based on nullable types are only boxed if the object is non-null. Now both the variables m and o exist but the value of o resides on the heap. This means that the values are independent of each other.The Microsoft standards says that to avoid Unnessary casting boxing because when we cast an object to Object class the Memory space allocated by the system is more and the performance may go down .

[Katty]

In boxing when a Variables Once Boxed are stored on Heap Memory and thus independent to each other. So if your application needs such a independent variable, use Boxing. The two boxed objects are identical to those created by boxing non-nullable types. The behavior of nullable types when boxed provides: boxed nullable types fully support the functionality of the underlying type, as well as Nullable objects and their boxed counterpart can be tested for null.