Why does VB.Net not support pointers?

[Jenil]

VB.NET does not support pointers: Why?

[Luuk]

A simple search finds a lot of pages on this topic, this is the first one:
How to do pointers in Visual Basic

and the second one:
Vb.net Pointers

Could you please give more details about your question after doing some research yourself?

[Frinavale]

VB.NET is a bit weird when it comes to pointers because you wouldn't think that it makes use of pointers; however, pretty much everything in VB.NET is a pointer!


To quickly answer your question:

VB.NET does not support pointers: Why?

VB.NET does support pointers! In fact it almost exclusively uses pointers. It appears as if VB.NET doesn't support pointers because it is so transparent but it is very important to understand what VB.NET is doing for you! Otherwise you will be confused when you pass something ByVal and it is changed in the calling code unexpectedly.


Here's more of an explanation of what I'm talking about...


Let's say I have a class Person defined as such:

Public Class Person
  Private _name As String
 
  Public ReadOnly Property Name As String
   Get 
     return _name
   End Get
   Set(ByVal value As String)
     _name = value
   End Set
  End Property
 
  Public Sub New(ByVal n As String)
    _name = n
  End Sub
 
End Class
 

And I create an instance to that person in my code as such:

Public Function Main(ByVal ParamArray Args() As String) As Integer
  Dim p As New Person("Frinavale")
 
  Return 0
End Function
 

The variable p is a pointer to a memory location that is allocated to hold the information about the person.

If I pass this instance to a this ChangeName method

Public Function Main(ByVal ParamArray Args() As String) As Integer
  Dim p As New Person("Frinavale")
 
  changePersonName(p, "Jenil")
 
  Return 0
End Function
 
Private Sub changePersonName(ByRef personInChaneNameMethod As Person, ByVal newName as String)
  personInChaneNameMethod.Name = newName
End Sub
 

The name for the variable p in the Main method will be changed to the new name.

But what is VERY important to know is that if we change the ByRef in the changePersonName method to be ByVal the same thing happens!!!

Why?

Because VB.NET only passes around pointers for anything that inherits from Object (which is pretty much everything).

If you pass a non-Object-inheriting item "ByVal" to the method, then the item in the calling code will not be changed (whereas if you pass this type "ByRef" it will be changed).

But if you pass an Object-inheriting item "ByVal" into a method it is still a pointer...so the item in the calling code Will be changed (in this case "ByRef" acts the same way).

To use pointers in VB.NET all you have to do is declare instances of Objects and use these variables


-Frinny