Question

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Why is the concept of Marshalling called as such?

Why the conversion between two types is called Marshalling! What is the meaning behind Marshal, why we don’t just use the word convert, is there any difference. Please try to keep a simple english as possible as you can.

Answer 1

Usually the word “marshalling” is used when you’re crossing some sort of boundary. Three obvious use cases:

• Remoting: the RPC data is marshalled to a separate machine (usually)
• AppDomains: an object crossing an AppDomain boundary needs to be marshalled (or it may be marshalled by reference)
• Cross-thread calls: if you use Control.Invoke or something similar, that’s called marshalling the delegate call to a different thread; so in this case the thread is the boundary

Plain conversions with no such boundaries involved are called just conversions.

For the reasoning behind using the word “marshal” here, see Etienne’s answer.