Crate soa_derive

This crate provides a custom derive (#[derive(StructOfArray)]) to automatically generate code from a given struct T that allow to replace Vec<T> with a struct of arrays. For example, the following code

#[derive(StructOfArray)]
pub struct Particle {
    pub x: f64,
    pub y: f64,
    pub z: f64,
}

will generate a ParticleVec struct that looks like this:

pub struct ParticleVec {
    pub x: Vec<f64>,
    pub y: Vec<f64>,
    pub z: Vec<f64>,
}

It will also generate the same functions that a Vec<Particle> would have, and a few helper structs: ParticleSlice, ParticleSliceMut, ParticleRef and ParticleRefMut.

How to use it

Add #[derive(StructOfArray)] to each struct you want to derive a struct of array version. If you need the helper structs to derive additional traits (such as Debug or PartialEq), you can add an attribute #[soa_derive = "Debug, PartialEq"] to the struct declaration.

#[derive(Debug, PartialEq, StructOfArray)]
#[soa_derive = "Debug, PartialEq"]
pub struct Particle {
    pub x: f64,
    pub y: f64,
    pub z: f64,
}

Caveats and limitations

Vec<T> functionalities rely a lot on references and automatic deref feature, for getting function from [T] and indexing. But the SoA vector (let's call it CheeseVec, generated from the Cheese struct) generated by this crate can not implement Deref<Target=CheeseSlice>, because Deref is required to return a reference, and CheeseSlice is not a reference. The same applies to Index and IndexMut trait, that can not return CheeseRef/CheeseRefMut.

This means that the we can not index into a CheeseVec, and that a few functions are duplicated, or require a call to as_ref()/as_mut() to change the type used.

Documentation

Please see http://lumol.org/soa-derive/soa_derive_example/ for a small example and the documentation of all the generated code.

Functions

soa_derive