Skip to content

basic chapter for representation of unions #39

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
merged 2 commits into from
Oct 25, 2018
Merged
Show file tree
Hide file tree
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions .gitignore
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
*~
36 changes: 36 additions & 0 deletions reference/src/representation/unions.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
# Representation of unions

**Disclaimer:** This chapter represents the consensus from issue
[#13]. The statements in here are not (yet) "guaranteed"
not to change until an RFC ratifies them.

[#13]: https://github.com/rust-rfcs/unsafe-code-guidelines/issues/13

The only degree of freedom the compiler has when computing the layout of a union
like

```rust
union U { f1: T1, f2: T2 }
```

is to determine the offset of the fields. The layout of these fields themselves
is already entirely determined by their types, and since we intend to allow
creating references to fields (`&u.f1`), unions do not have any wiggle-room
there.

### C-compatible layout ("repr C")

For unions tagged `#[repr(C)]`, the compiler will apply the C layout scheme. Per
sections [6.5.8.5] and [6.7.2.1.16] of the C11 specification, this means that
the offset of every field is 0. Unsafe code can case a pointer to the union to
a field type to obtain a pointer to any field, and vice versa.

[6.5.8.5]: http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c11/n1570.html#6.5.8p5
[6.7.2.1.16]: http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c11/n1570.html#6.7.2.1p16

### Default layout ("repr rust")

**The default layout of unions is not specified.** As of this writing, we want
to keep the option of using non-zero offsets open for the future; whether this
is useful depends on what exactly the compiler-assumed invariants about union
contents are.