Expand description
§rawbytes
A Rust crate to view a structure as a plain byte array (&[u8]
).
Super simple. Tiny. Zero dependencies.
This is a safer interface to slice::from_raw_parts_{mut}()
Example usage:
use rawbytes::RawBytes;
#[repr(C, packed(4))]
struct Foo {
x: [u32; 32],
}
#[test]
fn test() {
let mut foo = Foo { x: [0; 32] };
let foo_bytes = RawBytes::bytes_view(&foo);
assert_eq!(foo_bytes.len(), 128);
let foo_bytes = RawBytes::bytes_view_mut(&mut foo);
foo_bytes[0] = 1;
assert_eq!(foo.x[0], 1);
}
Note that structures must should have the C
representation to ensure that a new Rust release is not going to change the representation.
§Warning and alternatives
Warning: this crate contains two instances of the unsafe
keyword, because there are no other ways to achieve this in Rust. Still, you may be named and shamed for using a crate that perfectly does the job, but includes that keyword.
An alternative is the zerocopy
crate. It’s bigger, far more complex, not any faster, and it also require the unsafe
keyword. But it’s maintained by a Google employee, so you may be less named and shamed.