performance of byte vs. int in .NET

Question

In pre-.NET world I always assumed that int is faster than byte since this is how processor works.

Now it\'s matter habit of using int even when bytes could work, fo

Answer 1

Are you talking about storage space or operations on a byte? If it's storage space, yes it takes up less space than an int (1 byte vs 4 bytes).

In terms of arithmetic operations on a byte, I don't have raw numbers and really only a profiler can give them to you. However you should consider that arithmetic operations are not done on raw byte instances. Instead they are promoted to int's and then the operation is done on an int. This is why you have to explicitly cast operations like the following

byte b1 = 4;
byte b2 = 6;
byte b3 = b1 + b2;  // Does not compile because the type is int

So in the general case I think it's safe to say that arithmetic operations on an int are faster than that of a byte. Simply because in the byte case you pay the (probably very small) cost of type promotion.