Heap versus Stack allocation implications (.NET)

Question

From an SO answer¹ about Heap and Stack, it raised me a question: Why it is important to know where the variables are allocated?

At anoth

Answer 1

(edit: My original answer contained the oversimplification "structs are allocated on the stack" and confused stack-vs-heap and value-vs-reference concerns a bit, because they are coupled in C#.)

Whether objects live on the stack or not is an implementation detail which is not very important. Jon has already explained this well. When choosing between using a class and struct, it is more important to realize that reference types work differently than value types. Take the following simple class as an example:

public class Foo
{
   public int X = 0;
}

Now consider the following code:

Foo foo = new Foo();
Foo foo2 = foo;
foo2.X = 1;

In this example, foo and foo2 are references to the same object. Setting X on foo2 will also affect foo1. If we change the Foo class to a struct then this is no longer the case. This is because structs are not accessed through references. Assigning foo2 will actually make a copy.

One of the reasons for putting stuff on the stack is that the garbage collector does not have to clean it up. You typically should not worry about such things; just use classes! Modern garbage collectors do a pretty good job. Some modern virtual machines (like java 1.6) can even determine whether it is safe to allocate objects on the stack even if they are not value types.