How does a Nullable type work behind the scenes?

Question

I\'m curious to know how the Nullable type works behind the scenes. Is it creating a new object(objects can be assigned null) with a possible value of null?

In the

Answer 1

Here is the (tidied up) code from running .Net Reflector against Nullable...

[Serializable, StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential), TypeDependency("System.Collections.Generic.NullableComparer`1"), TypeDependency("System.Collections.Generic.NullableEqualityComparer`1")]
public struct Nullable where T: struct
{

private bool hasValue;
internal T value;

public Nullable(T value)
{
    this.value = value;
    this.hasValue = true;
}

public bool HasValue
{
    get
    {
        return this.hasValue;
    }
}

public T Value
{
    get
    {
        if (!this.HasValue)
        {
            ThrowHelper.ThrowInvalidOperationException(ExceptionResource.InvalidOperation_NoValue);
        }
        return this.value;
    }
}

public T GetValueOrDefault()
{
    return this.value;
}

public T GetValueOrDefault(T defaultValue)
{
    if (!this.HasValue)
    {
        return defaultValue;
    }
    return this.value;
}

public override bool Equals(object other)
{
    if (!this.HasValue)
    {
        return (other == null);
    }
    if (other == null)
    {
        return false;
    }
    return this.value.Equals(other);
}

public override int GetHashCode()
{
    if (!this.HasValue)
    {
        return 0;
    }
    return this.value.GetHashCode();
}

public override string ToString()
{
    if (!this.HasValue)
    {
        return "";
    }
    return this.value.ToString();
}

public static implicit operator Nullable(T value)
{
    return new Nullable(value);
}

public static explicit operator T(Nullable value)
{
    return value.Value;
}
}