Investigate combinations of unsafe & ref

[Nigel-Ecma]

In PR #837 @KalleOlaviNiemitalo raised two comments regarding combinations of unsafe & ref that they believe should be allowed. They are being pushed to this issue to allow the PR to proceed.

This should be allowed:

unsafe delegate ref int D(int* p);

link

This should be allowed:

class C {
    unsafe ref int M(int* p) => ref *p;
}

link

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Associated WorkItem - 157262

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

This also applies to local_function_declaration.

[jskeet]

Meeting 2023-09-06: Assigning to Bill to investigate further.

[BillWagner]

@KalleOlaviNiemitalo

This also applies to local_function_declaration.

Can you clarify what you mean here? Are you saying we need to define rules for local functions in unsafe code, or ref safety in local functions?

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

I mean 3.6.4 Local function declarations currently specifies this grammar:

local_function_declaration
    : local_function_modifier* return_type local_function_header local_function_body
    | ref_kind ref_return_type local_function_header ref_local_function_body
    ;

local_function_header
    : identifier '(' formal_parameter_list? ')'
    | identifier type_parameter_list '(' formal_parameter_list? ')' type_parameter_constraints_clause*
    ;

local_function_modifier
    : 'async'
    | unsafe_modifier   // unsafe code support
    ;

This grammar does not allow using unsafe_modifier together with ref_kind on the return type. So, for example, it does not allow the following, which should be allowed:

class C {
     static int i;
     void M() {
         unsafe ref int L() {
             int* p = null;
             return ref i;
         }         
    }
}

This is only a grammar error and not related to ref-safe-context.

Could be fixed like so:

local_function_declaration
    : local_function_modifier* return_type local_function_header local_function_body
    | ref_local_function_modifier* ref_kind ref_return_type local_function_header ref_local_function_body
    ;

local_function_header
    : identifier '(' formal_parameter_list? ')'
    | identifier type_parameter_list '(' formal_parameter_list? ')' type_parameter_constraints_clause*
    ;

local_function_modifier
    : 'async'
    | ref_local_function_modifier
    ;

ref_local_function_modifier
    : unsafe_modifier   // unsafe code support
    ;

Then in C# 8, 'static' could be added to ref_local_function_modifier and it would also become valid as local_function_modifier.

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

My two comments that were quoted in #886 (comment) likewise apply to grammar only. I had not even considered the ref safety aspects of pointer dereference in unsafe code. Maybe you'll want to leave this issue open until ref safety has been reviewed, but I hope the delegate_declaration, method_declaration, and local_function_declaration grammar can be fixed for C# 7.3 as it seems easy and I don't think it will cause any problems in the semantics because unsafe can already be specified in an outer class or struct declaration.