Machinery to support functions that return unsized values.
Written to support the unsized_vec crate, but is independent of it.
Requires nightly Rust.
Unsized values can take many forms:
-
On stable Rust, values of unsized types like [
str],[u8], anddyn Anyare generally encountered behind a pointer, like&strorBox<dyn Any>. -
Nightly Rust provides limited support for passing unsized values by value as arguments to functions, using the
unsized_fn_paramsfeature. There is alsounsized_locals, for storing these values on the stack using alloca. (However, that feature is "incomplete" and this crate doesn't make use of it). But even with thse two feature gates enabled, functions cannot return unsized values directly. Also, the only way to produce a by-value unsized value in today's Rust is by dereferencing a [Box]; this crate provides theunsizemacro to work around this limitation. -
For functions that return unsized values, this crate provides the [
Emplacable] type. Functions that want to return a value of typeT, whereTis unsized, return anEmplacable<T, _>instead.Emplacable<T>wraps a closure; that closure contains instructions for writing out aTto a caller-provided region of memory. Other functions accept theEmplacableas an argument and call its contained closure to write out theTto some allocation provided by them. For example, this crate provides the [box_new_with] function, which turns anEmplacable<T>into a [Box<T>].
Converting between types
| I have | I want | I can use |
|---|---|---|
[i32; 2] |
[i32] |
unsize |
[i32; 2] |
Emplacable<[i32; 2], _> |
[Into::into] |
[i32] |
Box<[i32]> |
[box_new] |
Box<[i32; 2]> |
Box<[i32]> |
CoerceUnsized |
Box<[i32]> |
[i32] |
dereference the box with * |
Box<[i32]> |
Emplacable<[i32], _> |
[Into::into] |
Vec<i32> |
Emplacable<[i32], _> |
[Into::into] |
Emplacable<[i32; 2], _> |
[i32; 2] |
[Emplacable::get] |
Emplacable<[i32; 2], _> |
Emplacable<[i32], _> |
[Into::into] |
Emplacable<[i32; 2], _> |
Emplacable<dyn Debug, _> |
[Emplacable::unsize] |
Emplacable<[i32], _> |
Box<[i32]> |
[box_new_with] |
Emplacable<[i32], _> |
Vec<i32> |
[Into::into] |
Emplacable<[i32], _> |
Rc<[i32]> |
[Into::into] |
Emplacable<[i32], _> |
Arc<[i32]> |
[Into::into] |
&[i32] |
Box<[i32]> |
[Into::into] |
&[i32] |
Emplacable<[i32], _> |
[Into::into] |
You can replace [i32; 2] and [i32] above by any pair of types (T, U)
such that T: Unsize<U>.
A note on examples
This crate has very few examples, as it provides tools to work with unsized types
but no fun things that use the tools. If you want more usage examples,
check out unsized-vec's documentation and the examples folder on GitHub.