Support for Validating Structs?

[CodingFlow]

Any chance support for validating structs with Validly possible? Does it make sense? I'm trying to use structs for DTOs, but just found Validly doesn't support them 😢

[Hookyns]

Yeah, no problem. I ignored structs because it is generally not recommended to use them for these purposes. Both DTOs and entities are usually larger than 16 bytes, which exceeds the commonly recommended size limit for structs versus classes. That said, I can still envision scenarios where validating structs makes sense.

[CodingFlow]

Gotcha. Do you have some good references on the 16 bytes rule of thumb? Thanks for replying so quickly.

[Hookyns]

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/design-guidelines/choosing-between-class-and-struct

However, this depends on how the struct is passed – by value or by reference (e.g. using in). There are also optimizations – I heared – when using readonly struct, so the guideline may not apply as strictly in that case, or the effective size “limit” may be higher.

The size guideline is primarily about memory copy costs. When passing a struct by value, the entire struct is copied; when passing it by reference, only a pointer is passed (typically 64 bits on a 64-bit platform). For larger structs, it is often faster to allocate and free an object on the heap and pass a 64-bit reference than to repeatedly copy the entire struct on the stack each time it is passed to a method.