While the JVM and the CLR often say that “the details of how objects are laid out in memory is not part of the public API and subject to change and don’t depend on it”, I have found that it is often necessary, or at least useful, to know that the layout of an object in memory is. This sequence of blogs does a great job of investigating and explaining those internals and providing a way to introspect the layout of an object.

  1. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/premier-developer/managed-object-internals-part-1-layout/
  2. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/premier-developer/managed-object-internals-part-2-object-header-layout-and-the-cost-of-locking/
  3. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/premier-developer/managed-object-internals-part-3-the-layout-of-a-managed-array-3/
  4. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/premier-developer/managed-object-internals-part-4-fields-layout/