4 ms·

Now that unions have stabilised, is there any significant un-expressable things in C APIs left? Bitfields?

• DDSDev 9y ago
  I have run into issues with bitfields, and flexible array members.
  • GolDDranks 9y ago
    I'm not familiar with flexible array members, what are they?
    • jcranmer 9y ago
      Having an empty array at the end of the struct which is really in-line data: struct foo { int num_elements; char data[0]; } struct foo *d = malloc(sizeof(foo) + num); d->num_elements = num; /* Now d->data is effectively an array char[num_elements] */
      • masklinn 9y ago
        IIRC that should work in Rust, Foo would be a DST.
        • Manishearth 9y ago
          So this is tricky. The way custom DSTs work in Rust is super annoying at the moment, but slightly less annoying for generics. You are free to define a custom DST that is like: struct Foo { header: u32, flexible: [SomeType] } However, there is no way to construct this type. The most you can do is calculate field offsets and write a ton of unsafe code. If the type was instead struct Foo<T: ?Sized> { header: u32, flexible: T } you would be able to construct a `&Foo<[SomeType]>` from a `&Foo<[SomeType; N]>` via DST coercions. This only works if you know the size of the array at compile time. For a runtime sized thing you have to implement a bespoke vector-like thing. You can find an example of that code in https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/e19fefcb474ea6593a684a1ca4ce616e61188ff0/components/servo_arc/lib.rs#L515-L594 https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/e19fefcb474ea6593a684a1c... where we have a generic "HeaderWithSlice<H, [T]>" type which can be heap allocated as a header followed by the flexible DST [T]. This could be improved. The HeaderWithSlice thing could probably be a useful crate for implementing completely-heap-allocated vectors (where the len/cap are on the heap) or shared reference counted types with flexible members. We haven't really split it out as a crate because we don't actually ever mutate it so the amount of code we need is significantly less (but it's not as useful as it could be). So yeah, flexible array members can be implemented in Rust, but it's a lot of hacky work. It's an equivalent amount of work and unsafety to write a custom Index impl on a repr(C) type with a zero-length array at the end. The DST doesn't actually get you much here.
      • jancsika 9y ago
        I've never quite understood this one. For example-- what happens if I create an array of foos and then malloc data of each element to some arbitrary size?
        • repsilat 9y ago
          You don't do that. Each one is usually allocated on its own, and you keep a pointer to each. Though you could store them contiguously if each contains a length member or they're delimited in some other way.
    • DDSDev 9y ago
      This page[1] gives a explanation of flexible array members. They were introduced in C99. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_array_member https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_array_member
• JoshTriplett 9y ago
  Yes, to the best of my knowledge, bitfields are the last thing in C APIs you can't express conveniently in Rust; you can handle them with careful macros, but that's annoying, just as it was for unions. In terms of things you can express now but that could still use some work: anonymous structs and unions. You currently still have to name all the intermediate aggregates, even when the C API doesn't. See https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-anonymous-struct-and-union-types/3894 https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-anonymous-struct-a... .
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • digikata 9y ago
    The tough thing about bitfields in C are their poor portability as they can get laid out differently in memory by platform and compiler. They're often avoided even in C when you're looking for a good degree of interoperation (e.g. structs used in networking or on-disk-formats, etc.).
    • JoshTriplett 9y ago
      Right. And we can't just say "we need bitfields", we need 100% C-compatible bitfields, for FFI.
      • adrianratnapala 9y ago
        But not very important for FFI, since bitfields rarely seem to show up in C APIs (presumably for exactly the reasons mentioned above). A kind of similar issue appears even with enums, because it is hard to guess the size of the integer that a given enum is implemented with. This is why it some not to use C enums in public interfaces to libraries.
        • JoshTriplett 9y ago
          > A kind of similar issue appears even with enums, because it is hard to guess the size of the integer that a given enum is implemented with. True; fortunately, Rust has a means of declaring the size of an enum, with #[repr(u8)] and similar. But you do have to figure out the size of the C enum.