In C#, should I use struct to wrap an object in order to fulfill additional interfaces?

Question

There is an existing class from a third-party library I want to reuse, but it does not implement some of the required interfaces. I'm thinking of wrapping it inside a struct to fulfill the required interfaces (basically like how Scala does it). The reason why I prefer struct over class for this use case is because it only stores one thing: the wrapped object, and it probably won't incur performance penalties? But I'm not sure if boxing would occur if I pass a struct to some method that takes in an interface? And are there any other drawbacks about this approach?

Answer 1

Microsoft gives very clear and straightforward reasons where you should use a struct instead of a class:

√ CONSIDER defining a struct instead of a class if instances of the type are small and commonly short-lived or are commonly embedded in other objects.

X AVOID defining a struct unless the type has all of the following characteristics:

• It logically represents a single value, similar to primitive types (int, double, etc.).
• It has an instance size under 16 bytes.
• It is immutable.
• It will not have to be boxed frequently.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229017.aspx

And seems like it's not your case. And btw yes, boxing will occur if you pass a struct to a method that takes an interface. Also take into account that structures don't support inheritance and they can't have explicit parameterless constructors.