indexing-movable-fixed-fields.md

Indexing fixed fields should not require pinning regardless of the movable/unmovable context.

The change has the size of a bug fix. It can be in 7.3 and does not conflict with whatever direction we take further. This change is only about allowing the following scenario to work even though s is moveable. It is already valid when s is not moveable.

NOTE: in either case, it still requires unsafe context. It is possible to read uninitialized data or even out of range. That is not changing.

unsafe struct S
{
    public fixed int myFixedField[10];
}

class Program
{
    static S s;

    unsafe static void Main()
    {
        int p = s.myFixedField[5]; // indexing fixed-size array fields would be ok
    }
}

The main “challenge” that I see here is how to explain the relaxation in the spec. In particular, since the following would still need pinning. (because s is moveable and we explicitly use the field as a pointer)

unsafe struct S
{
    public fixed int myFixedField[10];
}

class Program
{
    static S s;

    unsafe static void Main()
    {
        int* ptr = s.myFixedField; // taking a pointer explicitly still requires pinning.
        int p = ptr[5];
    }
}

One reason why we require pinning of the target when it is movable is the artifact of our code generation strategy, - we always convert to an unmanaged pointer and thus force the user to pin via fixed statement. However, conversion to unmanaged is unnecessary when doing indexing. The same unsafe pointer math is equally applicable when we have the receiver in the form of a managed pointer. If we do that, then the intermediate ref is managed (GC-tracked) and the pinning is unnecessary.

The change dotnet/roslyn#24966 is a prototype PR that relaxes this requirement.