Microsoft made all tuple types reference types in the interests of simplicity. Objectively, this was a mistake. Tuples with more than 4 fields are very unusual and should be replaced with a more typeful alternative anyway (such as a record type in F#) so only small tuples are of practical interest. My own benchmarks showed that unboxed tuples up to 512 bytes could still be faster than boxed tuples. Although memory efficiency is one concern, the dominant issue is the overhead of the garbage collector. Allocation and collection are particularly expensive on .NET because its garbage collector has not been very heavily optimized (e.g. compared to the JVM). Moreover, the default .NET GC (workstation) has not yet been parallelized. Consequently, parallel programs that use tuples grind to a halt as all cores contend for the shared garbage collector, destroying scalability. This is not only the dominant concern but, AFAIK, was completely neglected by Microsoft when they examined this probl...
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