Aliasing and the job system

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Last updated 12 days ago

Unity's job system infrastructure has some limitations on what can alias within a job struct:

Structs attributed with
```
[NativeContainer]
```
(for example,
```
NativeArray
```
and
```
NativeSlice
```
) that are members of a job struct don't alias.
Job struct members with the
```
[NativeDisableContainerSafetyRestriction]
```
attribute can alias with other members. This is because this attribute explicitly opts in to this kind of aliasing.
Pointers to structs attributed with
```
[NativeContainer]
```
can't appear in other structs attributed with
```
[NativeContainer]
```
. For example, you can't have a
```
NativeArray<NativeSlice<T>>
```
.
Job structs are by default
```
[NoAlias]
```
structs, i.e. the address of the struct is not allowed to alias with its members.

It is possible to opt out of these aliasing guarantees for job structs and for their members by using the experimental attribute

[Alias]

, which is gated behind the

UNITY_BURST_EXPERIMENTAL_ALIAS_ATTRIBUTE

preprocessor define.

The following example job shows how these limitations work in practice:


[BurstCompile]private struct MyJob : IJob{    public NativeArray<float> a;    public NativeArray<float> b;    public NativeSlice<int> c;    [NativeDisableContainerSafetyRestriction]    public NativeArray<byte> d;    public void Execute() { ... }}

```
a
```
,
```
b
```
, and
```
c
```
don't alias with each other.
```
d
```
can alias with
```
a
```
,
```
b
```
, or
```
c
```
.

Tip

If you're used to working with C/C++'s Type Based Alias Analysis (TBAA), then you might assume that because

has a different type from

, or

, it shouldn't alias. However, in C#, pointers don't have any assumptions that pointing to a different type results in no aliasing. This is why

is assumed to alias with

, or

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