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Is it better to transfer small or large strings by reference in C#? I assumed transferring by value would force the runtime to create a clone of the input string, and thus be slower. Is it recommended for all string functions to transfer values by reference therefore?
Your assumption is incorrect. String is a reference type – calling a method with a string argument just copies that reference, by value. There’s no cloning involved. It’s a fixed size – 4 or 8 bytes depending on which CLR you’re using.
(Even if it were a value type, it would have to basically contain a reference to something else – it wouldn’t make sense to have a variable-size value type allocated directly on the stack. How much space would be allocated for the variable? What would happen if you changed the value of the variable to a shorter or longer string?)