Question

I understand that the semantics of equality checking changes based on whether you are checking value types or rference types. Aren’t reference types just a higher level pointer? What exactly is happening when using a reference type? Is all the dereferencing, upcasting etc just being handled by the runtime now?

Answer 1

Yes, exactly, reference types are just “pointers” to memory that is managed by the garbage collector.

C++:

MyClass* mc = new MyClass();
Myclass* mc2 = mc;

mc == mc2 // true, points at the same memory address

C#:

MyClass mc = new MyClass();
MyClass mc2 = mc;

mc == mc2 // also true for the same reason