Sentinel

sentinel is a sentinel-terminated slice library.

How it works

Rust Slices

In Rust, the slice type &[T] is basically defined like that: (*const T, usize). The usize indicates the number of Ts referenced at the *const T. Knowing in advance the size of an array, like that, has numerous advantages, which won't be discussed here.

There is however two main problems with the &[T] type:

1. It is not (at least, yet) FFI-safe. One cannot create an extern "C" fn(s: &[u32]) function and expect it to work when calling it from C-code.

2. The size of &[T] has the size of two usizes.

Sentinels?

A sentinel is a special value that is used to determine the end of an array. For example, in C, the char * type can be a pointer to a "null-terminated" string. This is an example of sentinel-terminated slice.

CString:
char *ptr
 |
'H' 'e' 'l' 'l' 'o' '\0'
                      ^ sentinel, anything after this point may be invalid.
str:
*const u8, 5
 |
'H' 'e' 'l' 'l' 'o'
                    ^ no sentinel, we know the slice contains 5 elements.

This crate remains generic over how sentinels are defined. It uses the Sentinel trait, which is roughly defined like that:

trait Sentinel<T> {
    fn is_sentinel(val: &T) -> bool;
}

It is used to determine whether a specific instance of T should be treated as a "sentinel" value.

SSlice

Finally, in conjonction with the Sentinel trait, this crate defines the SSlice<T> type. It is generic over T, the type of stored elements, overing great flexibility.

struct SSlice<T> {
    _marker: PhantomData<T>,
}

Note that this type actually contains no data. Only references to this type can be created (i.e. &SSlice<T> or &mut SSlice<T>), and those references have the size a single usize.

FFI

The SSlice<T> type is FFI safe, which mean you can now write this:

// type CStr = sentinel::SSlice<u8>;

extern "C" {
    /// # Safety
    ///
    /// This will be `unsafe` because of `extern "C"`. But calling libc's `puts` with this
    /// signature is always sound!
    fn puts(s: &sentinel::CStr);
}

Or this!

extern crate libc;

use sentinel::{cstr, CStr, SSlice};

fn print(s: &CStr) {
    // SAFETY:
    //  `CStr` ensures that the string is null-terminated.
    unsafe { libc::puts(s.as_ptr() as _) };
}

#[no_mangle]
extern "C" fn main(_ac: libc::c_int, argv: &SSlice<Option<&CStr>>) -> libc::c_int {
    print(cstr!("Arguments:"));
    for arg in argv.iter().unwrap_sentinels() {
        print(arg);
    }

    0
}

Features

• alloc - adds support for the alloc crate. This adds the SBox<T> type.

• nightly - makes use of the unstable extern_type feature to make sure no instance of SSlice<T> can be created on the stack by making it !Sized. This feature also enables support for the new allocator_api unstable feature.

• libc - use the libc's strlen and memchr to look for null characters in sentinel-terminated slices.

• memchr - use the memchr crate to look for null characters in sentinel-terminated slices.

alloc and memchr are enabled by default.

Old sentinel crate

The name sentinel was kindly given to me by the previous maintainer of this project.

Every pre-0.2 versions (on crates.io) contain the source code of that crate.