Why should a .NET struct be less than 16 bytes?

Question

I\'ve read in a few places now that the maximum instance size for a struct should be 16 bytes.

But I cannot see where that number (16) comes from.

Browsing a

Answer 1

I think the 16 bytes is just a rule of thumb from a performance point of view. An object in .NET uses at least 24 bytes of memory (IIRC), so if you made your structure much larger than that, a reference type would be preferable.

I can't think of any reason why they chose 16 bytes specifically.