what is the exact maximum limit of elements in an array

Question

This is a purelly theoretical question, so please do not warn me of that in your answers.

If I am not mistaken, and since every array in .NET is indexed by an Int3

Answer 1

Well, in theory that's true. In fact, in theory there could be support for larger arrays - see this Array.CreateInstance signature which takes long values for the lengths. You wouldn't be able to index such an array using the C# indexers, but you could use GetValue(long).

However, in practical terms, I don't believe any implementation supports such huge arrays. The CLR has a per-object limit a bit short of 2GB, so even a byte array can't actually have 2147483648 elements. A bit of experimentation shows that on my box, the largest array you can create is new byte[2147483591]. (That's on the 64 bit .NET CLR; the version of Mono I've got installed chokes on that.)

EDIT: Just looking at the CLI spec, it specifies that arrays have a lower bound and upper bound of an Int32. That would mean upper bounds over Int32.MaxValue are prohibited even though they can be expressed with the Array.CreateInstance calls. However, it also means it's permissable to have an array with bounds Int32.MinValue...Int.MaxValue, i.e. 4294967296 elements in total.

EDIT: Looking again, ECMA 335 partition III section 4.20 (newarr) specifies that a initializing a vector type with newarr has to take either a native int or int32 value. So it looks like while the normally-more-lenient "array" type in CLI terminology has to have int32 bounds, a "vector" type doesn't.