vec exmaple maybe

pull/10/head
Alexis Beingessner 10 years ago committed by Manish Goregaokar
parent 736f072c13
commit aca268f272

@ -168,6 +168,8 @@ applied.
TODO: receiver coercions?
# Casts
@ -212,11 +214,10 @@ For numeric casts, there are quite a few cases to consider:
* casting from a larger integer to a smaller integer (e.g. u8 -> u32) will
* zero-extend if the target is unsigned
* sign-extend if the target is signed
* casting from a float to an integer will:
* round the float towards zero if finite
* casting from a float to an integer will round the float towards zero
* **NOTE: currently this will cause Undefined Behaviour if the rounded
value cannot be represented by the target integer type**. This is a bug
and will be fixed.
and will be fixed. (TODO: figure out what Inf and NaN do)
* casting from an integer to float will produce the floating point representation
of the integer, rounded if necessary (rounding strategy unspecified).
* casting from an f32 to an f64 is perfect and lossless.
@ -226,21 +227,41 @@ For numeric casts, there are quite a few cases to consider:
is finite but larger or smaller than the largest or smallest finite
value representable by f32**. This is a bug and will be fixed.
The casts involving rawptrs also allow us to completely bypass type-safety
by re-interpretting a pointer of T to a pointer of U for arbitrary types, as
well as interpret integers as addresses. However it is impossible to actually
*capitalize* on this violation in Safe Rust, because derefencing a raw ptr is
`unsafe`.
# Conversion Traits
TODO
TODO?
# Transmuting Types
Get out of our way type system! We're going to reinterpret these bits or die
trying! Even though this book is all about doing things that are unsafe, I really
can't emphasize that you should deeply think about finding Another Way than the
operations covered in this section. This is really, truly, the most horribly
unsafe thing you can do in Rust. The railguards here are dental floss.
`mem::transmute<T, U>` takes a value of type `T` and reinterprets it to have
type `U`. The only restriction is that the `T` and `U` are verified to have the
same size. The ways to cause Undefined Behaviour with this are mind boggling.
* First and foremost, creating an instance of *any* type with an invalid state
is going to cause arbitrary chaos that can't really be predicted.
* Transmute has an overloaded return type. If you do not specify the return type
it may produce a surprising type to satisfy inference.
* Making a primitive with an invalid value is UB
* Transmuting between non-repr(C) types is UB
* Transmuting an & to &mut is UB
* Transmuting to a reference without an explicitly provided lifetime
produces an [unbound lifetime](lifetimes.html#unbounded-lifetimes)
`mem::transmute_copy<T, U>` somehow manages to be *even more* wildly unsafe than
this. It copies `size_of<U>` bytes out of an `&T` and interprets them as a `U`.
The size check that `mem::transmute` has is gone (as it may be valid to copy
out a prefix), though it is Undefined Behaviour for `U` to be larger than `T`.
Also of course you can get most of the functionality of these functions using
pointer casts.

@ -23,6 +23,7 @@ stack or heap, we will not explain the syntax.
* [Uninitialized Memory](uninitialized.html)
* [Ownership-oriented resource management (RAII)](raii.html)
* [Concurrency](concurrency.html)
* [Example: Implementing Vec](vec.html)
@ -232,10 +233,6 @@ struct Vec<T> {
// We currently live in a nice imaginary world of only postive fixed-size
// types.
impl<T> Vec<T> {
fn new() -> Self {
Vec { ptr: heap::EMPTY, len: 0, cap: 0 }
}
fn push(&mut self, elem: T) {
if self.len == self.cap {
// not important for this example
@ -246,17 +243,6 @@ impl<T> Vec<T> {
self.len += 1;
}
}
fn pop(&mut self) -> Option<T> {
if self.len > 0 {
self.len -= 1;
unsafe {
Some(ptr::read(self.ptr.offset(self.len as isize)))
}
} else {
None
}
}
}
```

141
vec.md

@ -0,0 +1,141 @@
% Example: Implementing Vec
To bring everything together, we're going to write `std::Vec` from scratch.
Because the all the best tools for writing unsafe code are unstable, this
project will only work on nightly (as of Rust 1.2.0).
First off, we need to come up with the struct layout. Naively we want this
design:
```
struct Vec<T> {
ptr: *mut T,
cap: usize,
len: usize,
}
```
And indeed this would compile. Unfortunately, it would be incorrect. The compiler
will give us too strict variance, so e.g. an `&Vec<&'static str>` couldn't be used
where an `&Vec<&'a str>` was expected. More importantly, it will give incorrect
ownership information to dropck, as it will conservatively assume we don't own
any values of type `T`. See [the chapter on ownership and lifetimes]
(lifetimes.html) for details.
As we saw in the lifetimes chapter, we should use `Unique<T>` in place of `*mut T`
when we have a raw pointer to an allocation we own:
```
#![feature(unique)]
use std::ptr::Unique;
pub struct Vec<T> {
ptr: Unique<T>,
cap: usize,
len: usize,
}
```
As a recap, Unique is a wrapper around a raw pointer that declares that:
* We own at least one value of type `T`
* We are Send/Sync iff `T` is Send/Sync
* Our pointer is never null (and therefore `Option<Vec>` is null-pointer-optimized)
That last point is subtle. First, it makes `Unique::new` unsafe to call, because
putting `null` inside of it is Undefined Behaviour. It also throws a
wrench in an important feature of Vec (and indeed all of the std collections):
an empty Vec doesn't actually allocate at all. So if we can't allocate,
but also can't put a null pointer in `ptr`, what do we do in
`Vec::new`? Well, we just put some other garbage in there!
This is perfectly fine because we already have `cap == 0` as our sentinel for no
allocation. We don't even need to handle it specially in almost any code because
we usually need to check if `cap > len` or `len > 0` anyway. The traditional
Rust value to put here is `0x01`. The standard library actually exposes this
as `std::rt::heap::EMPTY`. There are quite a few places where we'll want to use
`heap::EMPTY` because there's no real allocation to talk about but `null` would
make the compiler angry.
All of the `heap` API is totally unstable under the `alloc` feature, though.
We could trivially define `heap::EMPTY` ourselves, but we'll want the rest of
the `heap` API anyway, so let's just get that dependency over with.
So:
```rust
#![feature(alloc)]
use std::rt::heap::EMPTY;
use std::mem;
impl<T> Vec<T> {
fn new() -> Self {
assert!(mem::size_of::<T>() != 0, "We're not ready to handle ZSTs");
unsafe {
// need to cast EMPTY to the actual ptr type we want, let
// inference handle it.
Vec { ptr: Unique::new(heap::EMPTY as *mut _), len: 0, cap: 0 }
}
}
}
```
I slipped in that assert there because zero-sized types will require some
special handling throughout our code, and I want to defer the issue for now.
Without this assert, some of our early drafts will do some Very Bad Things.
Next we need to figure out what to actually do when we *do* want space. For that,
we'll need to use the rest of the heap APIs. These basically allow us to
talk directly to Rust's instance of jemalloc.
We'll also need a way to handle out-of-memory conditions. The standard library
calls the `abort` intrinsic, but calling intrinsics from normal Rust code is a
pretty bad idea. Unfortunately, the `abort` exposed by the standard library
allocates. Not something we want to do during `oom`! Instead, we'll call
`std::process::exit`.
```rust
fn oom() {
::std::process::exit(-9999);
}
```
Okay, now we can write growing:
```rust
fn grow(&mut self) {
unsafe {
let align = mem::min_align_of::<T>();
let elem_size = mem::size_of::<T>();
let (new_cap, ptr) = if self.cap == 0 {
let ptr = heap::allocate(elem_size, align);
(1, ptr)
} else {
let new_cap = 2 * self.cap;
let ptr = heap::reallocate(*self.ptr as *mut _,
self.cap * elem_size,
new_cap * elem_size,
align);
(new_cap, ptr)
};
// If allocate or reallocate fail, we'll get `null` back
if ptr.is_null() { oom() }
self.ptr = Unique::new(ptr as *mut _);
self.cap = new_cap;
}
}
```
There's nothing particularly tricky in here: if we're totally empty, we need
to do a fresh allocation. Otherwise, we need to reallocate the current pointer.
Although we have a subtle bug here with the multiply overflow.
TODO: rest of this
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