Is there a speed benefit to using unsafe code in .Net to swap objects of complex types?

Question

Here is my current swap code for swapping 2 KeyValuePair objects in an array:

KeyValuePair<int, T> t = a[i];
            a[i] = a[j];
            a[j] = t;

Would there be any speed advantage to using unsafe code and merely swapping the pointers of the 2 objects? Or does the complier effectively boil this safe code down to effectively doing just that?

Answer 1

No, it won't be any faster.

This is premature micro-optimization at its worst.

In fact, it will be orders of magnitude slower, since you'll need to pin the array (using the fixed keyword) in order to get a pointer to it.