Unity Collections package

This package provides unmanaged data structures that can be used in jobs and Burst-compiled code.

The collections provided by this package fall into three categories:

• The collection types in Unity.Collections whose names start with Native- have safety checks for ensuring that they're properly disposed and are used in a thread-safe manner.
• The collection types in Unity.Collections.LowLevel.Unsafe whose names start with Unsafe- do not have these safety checks.
• The remaining collection types are not allocated and contain no pointers, so effectively their disposal and thread safety are never a concern. These types hold only small amounts of data.

The Native- types perform safety checks to ensure that indexes passed to their methods are in bounds, but the other types in most cases do not.

Several Native- types have Unsafe- equivalents, for example, NativeList has UnsafeList, and NativeHashMap has UnsafeHashMap.

While you should generally prefer using the Native- collections over their Unsafe- equivalents, Native- collections cannot contain other Native- collections (owing to the implementation of their safety checks). So if, say, you want a list of lists, you can have a NativeList<UnsafeList<T>> or an UnsafeList<UnsafeList<T>>, but you cannot have a NativeList<NativeList<T>>.

When safety checks are disabled, there is generally no significant performance difference between a Native- type and its Unsafe- equivalent. In fact, most Native- collections are implemented simply as wrappers of their Unsafe- counterparts. For example, NativeList is comprised of an UnsafeList plus a few handles used by the safety checks.

For more information on the specific collection types, see the documentation on Collection types