Advantages of using const instead of variables inside methods

Question

Whenever I have local variables in a method, ReSharper suggests to convert them to constants:

// instead of this:
var s = \"some string\";
var flags = Bindin         


        

Answer 1

A const value is also 'shared' between all instances of an object. It could result in lower memory usage as well.

As an example:

public class NonStatic
{
    int one = 1;
    int two = 2;
    int three = 3;
    int four = 4;
    int five = 5;
    int six = 6;
    int seven = 7;
    int eight = 8;
    int nine = 9;
    int ten = 10;        
}

public class Static
{
    static int one = 1;
    static int two = 2;
    static int three = 3;
    static int four = 4;
    static int five = 5;
    static int six = 6;
    static int seven = 7;
    static int eight = 8;
    static int nine = 9;
    static int ten = 10;
}

Memory consumption is tricky in .Net and I won't pretend to understand the finer details of it, but if you instantiate a list with a million 'Static' it is likely to use considerably less memory than if you do not.

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var maxSize = 1000000;
        var items = new List();
        //var items = new List();

        for (var i=0;i

When using 'NonStatic' the working set is 69,398,528 compared to only 32,423,936 when using static.