Comment by kuhsaft

Imo #4 is why it’s not that useful. If the data is larger than an atomic read/write op the data isn’t flattened and it’s a regular object with value equality and immutability.

You have to opt into force flattening, and then it’s the same as a struct, except it’s still heap allocated without escape analysis. You still have to implement synchronization to prevent tearing.

Static code analysis can give you a warning for potential tearing of structs.

DotNext.Threading provides Atomic<T> to enable high-performance atomic operations on structs without heap allocation.

https://dotnet.github.io/dotNext/features/core/atomic.html

The design of value classes just seems counteractive to its purpose: memory management. If I want to manage contiguous blocks of memory, let me manage contiguous blocks of memory. If I want to allocate something on the stack, let me allocate something on the stack.

The paradigms of struct vs object are too different and they’re trying to combine them into one.