What are the benefits to marking a field as `readonly` in C#?

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I don’t believe there are any performance gains from using a readonly field. It’s simply a check to ensure that once the object is fully constructed, that field cannot be pointed to a new value.

However “readonly” is very different from other types of read-only semantics because it’s enforced at runtime by the CLR. The readonly keyword compiles down to .initonly which is verifiable by the CLR.

The real advantage of this keyword is to generate immutable data structures. Immutable data structures by definition cannot be changed once constructed. This makes it very easy to reason about the behavior of a structure at runtime. For instance, there is no danger of passing an immutable structure to another random portion of code. They can’t changed it ever so you can program reliably against that structure.

Robert Pickering has written a good blog post about the benefits of immutability. The post can be found here or at the archive.org backup.

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