Nullable pointers

[Happypig375]

Now that in C# 8 we have nullable reference types, I started annotating an existing library. However, I discovered that pointers cannot be annotated:

public byte*? dist_context_map = null; // Error CS1519: Invalid token '?' in class, struct, or interface member declaration

Why is this the case? Can't we enable nullables all the way?

[Unknown6656]

A pointer is effectively stored as a int32 or int64 on the stack, meaning that it is a struct. The nullable refrence type feature of C#8 would hence be of not much use. However, you can do the following:

byte* ptr = null;
// is the same as:
byte* ptr = (byte*)0;

if (ptr == null) // "ptr is null" does also work here
{
    // do something
}

If using null on T* is not a valid solution for you, you might resort to IntPtr? and pointer casts

[NN---]

Did you mean you want non nullable pointers ?