nomicon/src/vec/vec-zsts.md

# Handling Zero-Sized Types

It's time. We're going to fight the specter that is zero-sized types. Safe Rust
*never* needs to care about this, but Vec is very intensive on raw pointers and
raw allocations, which are exactly the two things that care about
zero-sized types. We need to be careful of two things:

* The raw allocator API has undefined behavior if you pass in 0 for an
  allocation size.
* raw pointer offsets are no-ops for zero-sized types, which will break our
  C-style pointer iterator.

Thankfully we abstracted out pointer-iterators and allocating handling into
`RawValIter` and `RawVec` respectively. How mysteriously convenient.

## Allocating Zero-Sized Types

So if the allocator API doesn't support zero-sized allocations, what on earth
do we store as our allocation? `NonNull::dangling()` of course! Almost every operation
with a ZST is a no-op since ZSTs have exactly one value, and therefore no state needs
to be considered to store or load them. This actually extends to `ptr::read` and
`ptr::write`: they won't actually look at the pointer at all. As such we never need
to change the pointer.

Note however that our previous reliance on running out of memory before overflow is
no longer valid with zero-sized types. We must explicitly guard against capacity
overflow for zero-sized types.

Due to our current architecture, all this means is writing 3 guards, one in each
method of `RawVec`.

<!-- ignore: simplified code -->
```rust,ignore
impl<T> RawVec<T> {
    fn new() -> Self {
        // This branch should be stripped at compile time.
        let cap = if mem::size_of::<T>() == 0 { usize::MAX } else { 0 };

        // `NonNull::dangling()` doubles as "unallocated" and "zero-sized allocation"
        RawVec {
            ptr: NonNull::dangling(),
            cap,
        }
    }

    fn grow(&mut self) {
        // since we set the capacity to usize::MAX when T has size 0,
        // getting to here necessarily means the Vec is overfull.
        assert!(mem::size_of::<T>() != 0, "capacity overflow");

        let (new_cap, new_layout) = if self.cap == 0 {
            (1, Layout::array::<T>(1).unwrap())
        } else {
            // This can't overflow because we ensure self.cap <= isize::MAX.
            let new_cap = 2 * self.cap;

            // `Layout::array` checks that the number of bytes is <= usize::MAX,
            // but this is redundant since old_layout.size() <= isize::MAX,
            // so the `unwrap` should never fail.
            let new_layout = Layout::array::<T>(new_cap).unwrap();
            (new_cap, new_layout)
        };

        // Ensure that the new allocation doesn't exceed `isize::MAX` bytes.
        assert!(new_layout.size() <= isize::MAX as usize, "Allocation too large");

        let new_ptr = if self.cap == 0 {
            unsafe { alloc::alloc(new_layout) }
        } else {
            let old_layout = Layout::array::<T>(self.cap).unwrap();
            let old_ptr = self.ptr.as_ptr() as *mut u8;
            unsafe { alloc::realloc(old_ptr, old_layout, new_layout.size()) }
        };

        // If allocation fails, `new_ptr` will be null, in which case we abort.
        self.ptr = match NonNull::new(new_ptr as *mut T) {
            Some(p) => p,
            None => alloc::handle_alloc_error(new_layout),
        };
        self.cap = new_cap;
    }
}

impl<T> Drop for RawVec<T> {
    fn drop(&mut self) {
        let elem_size = mem::size_of::<T>();

        if self.cap != 0 && elem_size != 0 {
            unsafe {
                alloc::dealloc(
                    self.ptr.as_ptr() as *mut u8,
                    Layout::array::<T>(self.cap).unwrap(),
                );
            }
        }
    }
}
```

That's it. We support pushing and popping zero-sized types now. Our iterators
(that aren't provided by slice Deref) are still busted, though.

## Iterating Zero-Sized Types

Zero-sized offsets are no-ops. This means that our current design will always
initialize `start` and `end` as the same value, and our iterators will yield
nothing. The current solution to this is to cast the pointers to integers,
increment, and then cast them back:

<!-- ignore: simplified code -->
```rust,ignore
impl<T> RawValIter<T> {
    unsafe fn new(slice: &[T]) -> Self {
        RawValIter {
            start: slice.as_ptr(),
            end: if mem::size_of::<T>() == 0 {
                ((slice.as_ptr() as usize) + slice.len()) as *const _
            } else if slice.len() == 0 {
                slice.as_ptr()
            } else {
                slice.as_ptr().add(slice.len())
            },
        }
    }
}
```

Now we have a different bug. Instead of our iterators not running at all, our
iterators now run *forever*. We need to do the same trick in our iterator impls.
Also, our size_hint computation code will divide by 0 for ZSTs. Since we'll
basically be treating the two pointers as if they point to bytes, we'll just
map size 0 to divide by 1. Here's what `next` will be:

<!-- ignore: simplified code -->
```rust,ignore
fn next(&mut self) -> Option<T> {
    if self.start == self.end {
        None
    } else {
        unsafe {
            let result = ptr::read(self.start);
            self.start = if mem::size_of::<T>() == 0 {
                (self.start as usize + 1) as *const _
            } else {
                self.start.offset(1)
            };
            Some(result)
        }
    }
}
```

Do you see the "bug"? No one else did! The original author only noticed the
problem when linking to this page years later. This code is kind of dubious
because abusing the iterator pointers to be *counters* makes them unaligned!
Our *one job* when using ZSTs is to keep pointers aligned! *forehead slap*

Raw pointers don't need to be aligned at all times, so the basic trick of
using pointers as counters is *fine*, but they *should* definitely be aligned
when passed to `ptr::read`! This is *possibly* needless pedantry
because `ptr::read` is a noop for a ZST, but let's be a *little* more
responsible and read from `NonNull::dangling` on the ZST path.

(Alternatively you could call `read_unaligned` on the ZST path. Either is fine,
because either way we're making up a value from nothing and it all compiles
to doing nothing.)

<!-- ignore: simplified code -->
```rust,ignore
impl<T> Iterator for RawValIter<T> {
    type Item = T;
    fn next(&mut self) -> Option<T> {
        if self.start == self.end {
            None
        } else {
            unsafe {
                if mem::size_of::<T>() == 0 {
                    self.start = (self.start as usize + 1) as *const _;
                    Some(ptr::read(NonNull::<T>::dangling().as_ptr()))
                } else {
                    let old_ptr = self.start;
                    self.start = self.start.offset(1);
                    Some(ptr::read(old_ptr))
                }
            }
        }
    }

    fn size_hint(&self) -> (usize, Option<usize>) {
        let elem_size = mem::size_of::<T>();
        let len = (self.end as usize - self.start as usize)
                  / if elem_size == 0 { 1 } else { elem_size };
        (len, Some(len))
    }
}

impl<T> DoubleEndedIterator for RawValIter<T> {
    fn next_back(&mut self) -> Option<T> {
        if self.start == self.end {
            None
        } else {
            unsafe {
                if mem::size_of::<T>() == 0 {
                    self.end = (self.end as usize - 1) as *const _;
                    Some(ptr::read(NonNull::<T>::dangling().as_ptr()))
                } else {
                    self.end = self.end.offset(-1);
                    Some(ptr::read(self.end))
                }
            }
        }
    }
}
```

And that's it. Iteration works!