unsafe code

An assembly (program or library) using unsafe code must be compiled with a special switch and will be marked as such.

An exception to this is from using the structure, which is a safe managed equivalent to , and does not require unsafe code.

In particular Modula-3 added support for generic programming (similar to templates), multithreading, exception handling, garbage collection, object-oriented programming, partial revelation and explicit mark of unsafe code.

This allows programmers to use pointers and pointer arithmetic to directly pass and receive objects to/from the operating system or other native APIs using the native memory layout for those objects, while at the same time isolate such potentially unsafe code in specifically trusted assemblies.