Examples of Immutable Types in .Net

I am not sure if you're looking for publicly immutable types in .NET or types totally immutable at all. Furthermore you want to take care of only the public types in .NET? The deeper problem is defining what forms immutability. Does a class that only has

public readonly int[] Numbers;

makes it immutable? The Numbers itself can't be changed but its contents can be. You get the idea.

Anyway you could inspect yourself programmatically. For deeper nested checks you will need recursion (which I wont do here)

Load all assemblies you wanna check, and do something like (not tested)

var immutables = AppDomain.CurrentDomain
                .GetAssemblies()
                .SelectMany(t => t.GetTypes())
                .Where(t => t
                           .GetProperties(your binding flags depending on your definition)
                           .All(p => !p.CanWrite) 
                         && t
                           .GetFields(your binding flags depending on your definition)
                           .All(f => f.IsInitOnly)
                .ToList();

Even this wont be enough for finding immutability of collection types. Some of the immutable collection types (though not a part of default .NET core) can be found here: Immutable Collections


Some notable immutables:

  • some class types like String, Tuple, anonymous types
  • most structs (notable exceptions include most enumerators)
  • enums
  • delegates
  • immutable collection types like

    ImmutableArray (prerelease version)

    ImmutableDictionary

    ImmutableSortedDictionary

    ImmutableHashSet

    ImmutableList

    ImmutableQueue

    ImmutableSortedSet

    ImmutableStack


A list of immutable types in the framework class library follows below. (Feel free to expand it!)

System.…

  • All primitive value types: (Note: not all value types are immutable!)
    • Byte and SByte
    • Int16 and UInt16
    • Int32 and UInt32
    • Int64 and UInt64
    • IntPtr
    • Single
    • Double
  • Decimal
  • All anonymous types created by the compiler (new { ... } in C#, New With { ... } in VB.NET) (Wrong for two reasons: These types are not in the FCL, and apparently VB.NET types are mutable.)
  • All enumeration types (enum, Enum)
  • All delegate types. (see this answer. While it might seem that delegates are mutable (since you can do things like obj.PropertyChanged += callback, it's actually the obj.PropertyChanged reference that is mutated to point to a newly constructed delegate instance; the original delegate instance stays unchanged.)
  • DateTime, TimeSpan (mentioned in this answer) and DateTimeOffset
  • DBNull
  • Guid
  • Nullable<T>
  • String
  • The Tuple<…> types introduced with .NET 4 (mentioned in this answer)
  • Uri
  • Version
  • Void

System.Linq.…

  • Lookup<TKey, TElement>