Why is it possible to instantiate a struct without the new keyword?

Question

Why are we not forced to instantiate a struct, like when using a class?

Answer 1

The why is simply - because the spec says so. The how is a matter of ensuring that the entire block of memory is "definitely assigned", which means: assigning a value to each field of the struct. However, this requires 2 nasty things:

• public fields (almost always bad)
• mutable fields (generally bad in a struct)

so in most best-practice cases, you do need to use the new(...) syntax, to invoke the constructor (or to zero-the memory, for the parameterless constructor) for the type correctly.