title: What's the size of a reference on the CLR
body: <p>I was (purely out of curiosity) trying to find out what the size of an actual reference is when an allocation is made on the stack.</p>
  
  <p>After reading <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/207592/getting-the-size-of-a-field-in-bytes-with-c">this</a> I still don't know (this answers it only for value types or type definitions), and I still cannot seem to find it anywhere.</p>
  
  <p>So basically imagine a class as follows</p>
  
  <pre><code>class A
  {
      string a;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now when an object of type A is instantiated, a reference to the string object would be stored on the stack, now what would the size of the allocation on the stack be?</p>
  
  <p>Disclaimer: If I'm talking complete and utter nonsense please let me know :)</p>