Why is the exception a class and not a structure?

Question

An exception is a single piece of information.
Exceptions are (or should be) by definition rare cases in the life of an application, so boxing, unpacking and copying is not a problem I guess.
Exceptions are almost always outside the scope they were thrown from, so there is a risk of having an exception reference stored somewhere, making it a good candidate to advance to the next generation of GC, whereas structures are easier to clean up.
Immutable Struct is thread safe.

You never want the exception to be null (even the compiler or the CLR forces you to do this, try something below):

throw null;

then you get:

NullReferenceException

Is there any specific reason why exceptions are classes?

+3

c # struct class exception

Creo Apr 14. 17 at 10:31

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1 answer

MacakM · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-14T10:45:19+0000

The two most important things are:

Structures cannot be inherited, so you cannot do any kind of hierarchy in your exceptions
In case of StackOverflowException, you cannot allocate memory on the stack, you need a heap