Is there a limit of elements that could be stored in a List ? or you can just keeping adding elements untill you are out of memory ?
+20
A:
The current implementation of List<T> uses Int32 everywhere - to construct its backing array, for its Count property, as an indexer and for all its internal operations - so there's a current theoretical maximum of Int32.MaxValue items (2^31-1 or 2147483647).
But the .NET framework also has a maximum object size limit of 2GB, so you'll only get anywhere near the items limit with lists of single-byte items such as List<byte> or List<bool>.
In practice you'll probably run out of contiguous memory before you hit either of those limits.
LukeH
2009-11-13 17:45:09
*Theoretically* that means you can only randomly access items up to `Int32.MaxValue`, not how many elements can there be, *theoretically*, of course.
Martinho Fernandes
2009-11-13 17:46:33
@Martinho: Well, the current implementation uses `Int32` *everywhere*, so it's not just random access that's restricted to 2^31 items. (Of course, the use of `Int32` internally is just an implementation detail, but properties like the indexer and `Count` are part of the public contract.)
LukeH
2009-11-13 18:22:38