Accommodating nested unsafe structs in C#

Question

What is the best way to accommodate the following:

Real time, performance critical application that interfaces with a native C dll for communicating with a proprietary back end.

The native api has hundreds upon hundreds of structs, nested structs and methods that pass data back and forth via these structs.

Want to use c# for logic, so decided on unsafe c# in favor of cli and marshaling. I know how and have implemented this via the later so please don't reply "use cli". Marshaling hundreds of structs a hundred times a second introduces a significant enough delay that it warranted investigating unsafe c#.

Most of the c structs contain dozens of fields, so looking for a method to do minimal typing on each. At this point, got it down to running a VS macro to convert each line element to c# equivalent setting arrays to fixed size when necessary. This work pretty well until I hit a nested struct array. So for example, I have these 2 structs:

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential,Pack=1)]
unsafe struct User{
    int id;
    fixed char name[12];
}

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential,Pack=1)]
unsafe structs UserGroup{
    fixed char name[12];
    fixed User users[512]
    int somethingElse;
    fixed char anotherThing[16]
}

What is the best way to accommodate fixed User users[512] so that to not have to do much during run time?

I have seen examples where the suggestion is to do

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential,Pack=1)]
unsafe structs UserGroup{
    fixed char name[12];
    User users_1;
    User users_2;
    ...
    User users_511;
    int somethingElse;
    fixed char anotherThing[16]
}

Another idea has been, to compute the size of User in bytes and just do this

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential,Pack=1)]
unsafe structs UserGroup{
    fixed char name[12];
    fixed byte Users[28*512];
    int somethingElse;
    fixed char anotherThing[16]
}

But that would mean that I would have to do special treatment to this struct every time I need to use it, or wrap it with some other code. There are enough of those in the api that I would like to avoid this approach, but if someone can demonstrate an elegant way I that could work as well

A third approach that eludes me enough that I can't produce and example(i think i saw somewhere but cant find it anymore), is to specify size for User or somehow make it strictly sized so that you could use a "fixed" keyword on it.

Can anyone recommend a reasonable approach that they have utilized and scales well under load?

Dmitry Dmitry · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-20T04:16:59

The best way I could find nested struct in unsafe structs is by defining them as fixed byte arrays and then providing a runtime conversion property for the field. For example:

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential,Pack=1)]
unsafe struct UserGroup{
    fixed char name[12];
    fixed User users[512]
    int somethingElse;
    fixed char anotherThing[16]
}

Turns into:

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential,Pack=1)]
unsafe struct UserGroup{
    fixed char name[12];
    fixed byte users[512 * Constants.SizeOfUser]
    int somethingElse;
    fixed char anotherThing[16];
    public User[] Users
    {
        get
        {
            var retArr = new User[512];
            fixed(User* retArrRef = retArr){
                fixed(byte* usersFixed = users){
                    {
                        Memory.Copy(usersFixed, retArrRef,  512 * Constants.SizeOfUser);
                    }
                }
            }
            return retArr;
        }
    }
}

Pleas note, this code uses Memory.Copy function provided here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa664786(v=vs.71).aspx

The general explanation of the geter is as follows:

allocate a managed array for the return value
get and fix an unsafe pointer to it
get and fix an unsafe pointer to the byte array for the struct
copy the memory from one to the other

The reason why the managed array is not getting stored back into the struct it self is because it would modify its layout and would not translate correctly anymore, while the prop is a no issue when getting it from un-managed. Alternatively, this could be wrapped in another managed object that does the storing.

Accommodating nested unsafe structs in C#

1 Answers