C# 8 Unmanaged Constructed Types

What is Unmanaged Type?

A type is called unmanaged when it can be used in an unsafe context. The following are the unmanaged types.

• sbyte, byte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, ulong, char, float, double, decimal, or bool
• Any enum type
• Any pointer type
• Any user-defined struct type that contains fields of unmanaged types only

What is Constructed Types?

A type is called constructed if it is generic and the type parameter is already defined, such as List<string>, List, etc.

Before C# 8.0, a constructed type or a type that includes at least one type argument can't be an unmanaged type, but in C# 8.0, a constructed value type is unmanaged if it contains fields of unmanaged types only.

Let's consider the following example of an unmanaged constructed type that it was not possible to declare before C# 8.0.

public struct Point3D<T>
{
    public T X;
    public T Y;
    public T Z;
}

The above example defines the generic Point3D<T> type. The Point3D<double> type is an unmanaged type, and for any unmanaged type, you can create a pointer to a variable of this type or allocate a block of memory on the stack for instances of this type as shown below.

Span<Point3D<double>> points = stackalloc[] 
{ 
    new Point3D<double> { X = 0.0, Y = 0.0, Z = 0.0 }, 
    new Point3D<double> { X = 0.0, Y = 3.0, Z = 0.0 }, 
    new Point3D<double> { X = 4.0, Y = 0.0, Z = 0.0 } 
};

foreach (var point in points)
{
    Console.WriteLine("X: {0}, Y: {1}, Z: {2}", point.X, point.Y, point.Z);
}

A generic struct may be the source of both unmanaged and not unmanaged constructed types. The above example defines a generic struct Point3D<T> and presents an unmanaged constructed types.