Crate windows_ext

Extensions for windows-rs and windows-sys

The extensions defined in this module aim to help make the windows crates more ergonomic to use, providing the well-known macros from the SDK headers to us mere mortals who prefer memory safety and fearlessness.

By default, the minwindef functions are included as these are frequently imported either directly or indirectly (a lot of the other headers import it too) and a quick search for the name reveals it’s at least referenced in 58 other headers. An additional feature will become available that makes the functions defined there also available through implemented traits for some of the types defined in the windows crates.

Exporting the minwindef functions, however useful they may be, can be turned off by using the no-minwindef anti-feature. This only disables its export, not its use elsewhere in this crate. The functions are a bunch of oneliners annotated for always inlinging. This was done both to keep in line with what C++ does with macros (expanding the code inline at compile time) and because the function call would be inlined with any level of optimization enabled (yes, even -O1). Sorry, but there is no plan to manually inline code being called in as many places as this based on a feature flag when the output would be no different either way. The inline annotation was added instead, as a way to not impact the resulting binary size; the function call is almost as big as the bitops.

As it stands, this crate only implements a single header. Please do feel free to contribute to the project by implementing more macros and header-only functions that aren’t available in the windows-rs and windows-sys bindings!

windows-rs or windows-sys?

That’s right, it’s a mutually exclusive choice here. For now at least. A fair few types defined in the crates are effectively the same thing, but they conflict due to being defined separately. This means Rust will treat these objects as different types. As such, a choice was made to disallow having both optional dependencies. Perhaps this will change in the future if there’s some easily applicable and readable way to implement on both copies. Until then, you’ll have to choose between:

• The default feature (windows-rs)
• no default features and windows-sys

Modules

• minwindef
  minwindef.h macros for use in Rust with the windows-rs and windows-sys crates