Strings in .NET - Things I learned

Here's what I looked like while learning about strings in .NET:

What do I think they are?

I can't lie I have no idea how Strings are stored or even compared. But maybe we can find that out.

5 things that I learned while looking at strings

• Vectors are an iterable list :)
• Empty is a constant that holds the empty string value. Determined at runtime.
• Constructors will use FastAllocateString(length) to assign Memory and use Buffer.Memmove to move the char[] value provided into that memory.
• Comparison EqualsHelper:
  • Compares the byte[] of both strings as a ref.
  • Tries to use the biggest Byte Vectors possible. Hardware must support it.
  • Inspects the 2 strings in the largest "chunks" possible, determined by biggest Byte Vector.
  • Compares the Bytes
  • Uses goto to keep common returns e.g. NotEqual or Equal in one place.
• I had no clue that you could use Preprocessor Directives to make optional if/else blocks.
• There were a lot of comments referencing "EE", which apparently means "Execution Engine".

# if DEBUG
    if (isTrue){
        ...
    }
    else
# endif
    {
        ...
    }

What were the differences?

There's a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to strings. They say you don't know what you don't know, and this exercise opened a can of worms when it comes to understanding .NET.