Question

Could someone point out the idea of overloading operator== to perform deep object comparison (instead of reference comparison).

From MSDN:

By default, the operator == tests for reference equality by determining whether two references indicate the same object. Therefore, reference types do not have to implement operator == in order to gain this functionality. When a type is immutable, that is, the data that is contained in the instance cannot be changed, overloading operator == to compare value equality instead of reference equality can be useful because, as immutable objects, they can be considered the same as long as they have the same value. It is not a good idea to override operator == in non-immutable types.

When would it actually benefit?

And, like, if every object has method Equals, which makes value comparison possible, why would someone ever perform value (not reference) comparison using x == y statement?

I guess I don’t understand something, because this looks very weird to me.

Answer 1

Overloading the == operator allows you to write x == y, which is much more natural than x.Equals(y), and will work even if x is null.