When to use pointers in C#/.NET?

Question

I know C# gives the programmer the ability to access, use pointers in an unsafe context. But When is this needed?

At what circumstances, using pointers becomes inevitable?

Is it only for performance reasons?

Also why does C# expose this functionality through an unsafe context, and remove all of the managed advantages from it? Is it possible to have use pointers without losing any advantages of managed environment, theoretically?

Answer 1

Pointers are an inherent contradiction to the managed, garbage-collected, environment.
Once you start messing with raw pointers, the GC has no clue what's going on.

Specifically, it cannot tell whether objects are reachable, since it doesn't know where your pointers are.
It also cannot move objects around in memory, since that would break your pointers.

All of this would be solved by GC-tracked pointers; that's what references are.

You should only use pointers in messy advanced interop scenarios or for highly sophisticated optimization.
If you have to ask, you probably shouldn't.

Answer 2

When is this needed? Under what circumstances does using pointers becomes inevitable?

When the net cost of a managed, safe solution is unacceptable but the net cost of an unsafe solution is acceptable. You can determine the net cost or net benefit by subtracting the total benefits from the total costs. The benefits of an unsafe solution are things like "no time wasted on unnecessary runtime checks to ensure correctness"; the costs are (1) having to write code that is safe even with the managed safety system turned off, and (2) having to deal with potentially making the garbage collector less efficient, because it cannot move around memory that has an unmanaged pointer into it.

Or, if you are the person writing the marshalling layer.

Is it only for performance reasons?

It seems perverse to use pointers in a managed language for reasons other than performance.

You can use the methods in the Marshal class to deal with interoperating with unmanaged code in the vast majority of cases. (There might be a few cases in which it is difficult or impossible to use the marshalling gear to solve an interop problem, but I don't know of any.)

Of course, as I said, if you are the person writing the Marshal class then obviously you don't get to use the marshalling layer to solve your problem. In that case you'd need to implement it using pointers.

Why does C# expose this functionality through an unsafe context, and remove all of the managed advantages from it?

Those managed advantages come with performance costs. For example, every time you ask an array for its tenth element, the runtime needs to do a check to see if there is a tenth element, and throw an exception if there isn't. With pointers that runtime cost is eliminated.

The corresponding developer cost is that if you do it wrong then you get to deal with memory corruption bugs that formats your hard disk and crashes your process an hour later rather than dealing with a nice clean exception at the point of the error.

Is it possible to use pointers without losing any advantages of managed environment, theoretically?

By "advantages" I assume you mean advantages like garbage collection, type safety and referential integrity. Thus your question is essentially "is it in theory possible to turn off the safety system but still get the benefits of the safety system being turned on?" No, clearly it is not. If you turn off that safety system because you don't like how expensive it is then you don't get the benefits of it being on!