Q. Why would I choose this answer?<\/p>\n
In other words, go with another answer unless you have a performance bottleneck that needs fixing, and you can prove it with a profiler.<\/p>\n
The following method of performing a deep clone is:<\/p>\n
For ultimate speed, you can use Nested MemberwiseClone to do a deep copy. Its almost the same speed as copying a value struct, and is much faster than (a) reflection or (b) serialization (as described in other answers on this page).<\/p>\n
Note that if you use Nested MemberwiseClone for a deep copy, you have to manually implement a ShallowCopy for each nested level in the class, and a DeepCopy which calls all said ShallowCopy methods to create a complete clone. This is simple: only a few lines in total, see the demo code below.<\/p>\n
Here is the output of the code showing the relative performance difference for 100,000 clones:<\/p>\n
Using Nested MemberwiseClone on a class almost as fast as copying a struct, and copying a struct is pretty darn close to the theoretical maximum speed .NET is capable of.<\/p>\n
To understand how to do a deep copy using MemberwiseCopy, here is the demo project that was used to generate the times above:<\/p>\n
Then, call the demo from main:<\/p>\n
Again, note that if you use Nested MemberwiseClone for a deep copy, you have to manually implement a ShallowCopy for each nested level in the class, and a DeepCopy which calls all said ShallowCopy methods to create a complete clone. This is simple: only a few lines in total, see the demo code above.<\/p>\n
Note that when it comes to cloning an object, there is is a big difference between a \"struct\" and a \"class\":<\/p>\n
See differences between value types and references types.<\/p>\n
One excellent use case for this code is feeding clones of a nested class or struct into a queue, to implement the producer \/ consumer pattern. <\/p>\n
This works extremely well in practice, and allows us to decouple many threads (the producers) from one or more threads (the consumers).<\/p>\n
And this method is blindingly fast too: if we use nested structs, it's 35x faster than serializing\/deserializing nested classes, and allows us to take advantage of all of the threads available on the machine.<\/p>\n
Apparently, ExpressMapper is as fast, if not faster, than hand coding such as above. I might have to see how they compare with a profiler. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Continue reading here: <\/p>\n
c# - Deep cloning objects - Stack Overflow<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"