ACTIVATION_CONTEXT_COMPATIBILITY_INFORMATION not getting marked as unsafe when it contains a pointer

[sotteson1]

winnt.h:

typedef struct _ACTIVATION_CONTEXT_COMPATIBILITY_INFORMATION {
    DWORD ElementCount;
    COMPATIBILITY_CONTEXT_ELEMENT Elements[];
} ACTIVATION_CONTEXT_COMPATIBILITY_INFORMATION, * PACTIVATION_CONTEXT_COMPATIBILITY_INFORMATION;

Scanned output:

    public partial struct ACTIVATION_CONTEXT_COMPATIBILITY_INFORMATION
    {
        [NativeTypeName("DWORD")]
        public uint ElementCount;

        [NativeTypeName("COMPATIBILITY_CONTEXT_ELEMENT[]")]
        public COMPATIBILITY_CONTEXT_ELEMENT* Elements;
    }

This was using 14.0.0-beta2, which I'm trying to upgrade to in the Win32Metadata project. The previous version I was using omitted the * but I was able to turn it into an array by looking at the NativeTypeName attribute.

[tannergooding]

Reopening. The issue isn't that unsafe is missing but this being treated as a pointer at all.

C incomplete arrays are the "same" as zero sized arrays (that is COMPATIBILITY_CONTEXT_ELEMENT Elements[] is the same as COMPATIBILITY_CONTEXT_ELEMENT Elements[0]).

This has interesting behaviors where-as it is functionally:

    public partial struct ACTIVATION_CONTEXT_COMPATIBILITY_INFORMATION
    {
        [NativeTypeName("DWORD")]
        public uint ElementCount;

        [NativeTypeName("COMPATIBILITY_CONTEXT_ELEMENT[]")]
        public COMPATIBILITY_CONTEXT_ELEMENT Elements;
    }

And where Elements impacts the alignment/packing of the struct, but where sizeof is not supposed to include the size of the single Elements entry.

[tannergooding]

Much like many structs that have 0/1 fixed-sized buffers, these "must" be the last element and the overall struct must always be accessed/passed by reference.