Usage
This very restrictive notion of blittable types appears to limit the usefulness of the interoperability services provided by .NET, but this is not so. While blittable types allow a straightforward definition of interoperable types, various ways exist to explicitly define how a non-blittable type should be converted by the interop marshaler. For example, in the .NET languages there are many attributes which can be applied to fields in types, to types themselves and to method parameters to indicate to the marshaler how to handle those particular data. These attributes have various purposes, such as detailing the packing or alignment of a type, specifying offsets of fields in a type, specifying array or string representations, controlling parameter-passing style for function calls, specifying memory management techniques, and more. If none of the attributes or other tools that are provided in the framework are adequate, fine-grained control is provided by the ability to implement the ICustomMarshaler interface and manually perform the conversion of data in both directions. Complete coverage of interoperation between managed and unmanaged code is out of the scope of this discussion, so please refer to the See Also section for more information. However, understanding what constitutes a blittable type allows a developer to identify situations where intervention is and is not required for a type to be correctly marshaled. In this way, less time is wasted on over-specification of types or function calls.
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