C# 9 Native Integers

The native-sized integers are designed to be an integer that allows us to use 32 bits on 32-bit systems, and 64 bits on 64-bit systems.

• It supports native-sized signed and unsigned integer types.
• The motivation here is for interop scenarios and low-level libraries.
• The identifiers nint and nuint are new contextual keywords that represent native signed and unsigned integer types.
• The nint and nuint are represented by the underlying types System.IntPtr and System.UIntPtr with compiler surfacing additional conversions and operations for those types as native ints.

The identifiers are only treated as keywords when name lookup does not find a viable result at that program location.

int x = 3;
nint y = 3;
nint z = y + 1;
z--;

var name1 = typeof(nint);              // System.IntPtr
var name2 = typeof(nuint);             // System.UIntPtr
var name3 = (x + 1).GetType();         // System.Int32
var name4 = (y + 1).GetType();         // System.IntPtr
var name5 = (x + y).GetType();         // System.IntPtr
                                       
long v = 10;                           
var name6 = (x + v).GetType();         // System.Int64

var result1 = nint.Equals(x, y);       // False
var result2 = nint.Equals((nint)x, y); // True
var result3 = y + 1 > x;               // True;
var result4 = y - 1 == x;              // False

As you can see, when you add an int to a nint the result is a nint, but if you add a long to a nint the result will be a long. This is because the native depending on the platform could be a 32-bit integer or a 64-bits integer.

An arrays support native-sized signed type as an index as shown below.

string[] daysOfWeek = { "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday", "Sunday" };

for (nint i = 0; i < 7; i++)
{
    Console.WriteLine(daysOfWeek[i]);
}

Constants

Constant expressions may be of type nint or nuint. There is no direct syntax for native int literals.

• The nint constants are in the range [ int.MinValue, int.MaxValue ]
• The nuint constants are in the range [ uint.MinValue, uint.MaxValue ].
• There are no MinValue or MaxValue fields on nint or nuint because, other than nuint.MinValue, those values cannot be emitted as constants.