CLR Generics and Struct Boxing

The PR comments from @benaadams here are awesome. https://github.com/dotnet/corefxlab/pull/2358 This is likely basic knowledge needed for high-performance .NET, but it was new to me. Very interesting to see how defining a generic <T> can eliminate boxing/allocations.

The T parameter is explicitly being specified as an interface: IBufferWriter<byte>; so if you create that BufferWriter<IBufferWriter<byte>> and give it a struct as the T, then its boxed to the interface and stored in the BufferWriter<IBufferWriter<byte>> as the boxed IBufferWriter<byte> type. So, if you explicitly specify the T, it will get boxed. If you specify it as a generic, and then call the generic constructor, it will not.

public static JsonWriter<TBufferWriter> Create<TBufferWriter>(TBufferWriter bufferWriter, bool isUtf8, bool prettyPrint = false) where TBufferWriter : IBufferWriter<byte>
{
     return new JsonWriter<TBufferWriter>(bufferWriter, isUtf8, prettyPrint);
}