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authorDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-17 12:02:58 +0000
committerDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-17 12:02:58 +0000
commit698f8c2f01ea549d77d7dc3338a12e04c11057b9 (patch)
tree173a775858bd501c378080a10dca74132f05bc50 /library/alloc/src/ffi/mod.rs
parentInitial commit. (diff)
downloadrustc-698f8c2f01ea549d77d7dc3338a12e04c11057b9.tar.xz
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Adding upstream version 1.64.0+dfsg1.upstream/1.64.0+dfsg1
Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>
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+//! Utilities related to FFI bindings.
+//!
+//! This module provides utilities to handle data across non-Rust
+//! interfaces, like other programming languages and the underlying
+//! operating system. It is mainly of use for FFI (Foreign Function
+//! Interface) bindings and code that needs to exchange C-like strings
+//! with other languages.
+//!
+//! # Overview
+//!
+//! Rust represents owned strings with the [`String`] type, and
+//! borrowed slices of strings with the [`str`] primitive. Both are
+//! always in UTF-8 encoding, and may contain nul bytes in the middle,
+//! i.e., if you look at the bytes that make up the string, there may
+//! be a `\0` among them. Both `String` and `str` store their length
+//! explicitly; there are no nul terminators at the end of strings
+//! like in C.
+//!
+//! C strings are different from Rust strings:
+//!
+//! * **Encodings** - Rust strings are UTF-8, but C strings may use
+//! other encodings. If you are using a string from C, you should
+//! check its encoding explicitly, rather than just assuming that it
+//! is UTF-8 like you can do in Rust.
+//!
+//! * **Character size** - C strings may use `char` or `wchar_t`-sized
+//! characters; please **note** that C's `char` is different from Rust's.
+//! The C standard leaves the actual sizes of those types open to
+//! interpretation, but defines different APIs for strings made up of
+//! each character type. Rust strings are always UTF-8, so different
+//! Unicode characters will be encoded in a variable number of bytes
+//! each. The Rust type [`char`] represents a '[Unicode scalar
+//! value]', which is similar to, but not the same as, a '[Unicode
+//! code point]'.
+//!
+//! * **Nul terminators and implicit string lengths** - Often, C
+//! strings are nul-terminated, i.e., they have a `\0` character at the
+//! end. The length of a string buffer is not stored, but has to be
+//! calculated; to compute the length of a string, C code must
+//! manually call a function like `strlen()` for `char`-based strings,
+//! or `wcslen()` for `wchar_t`-based ones. Those functions return
+//! the number of characters in the string excluding the nul
+//! terminator, so the buffer length is really `len+1` characters.
+//! Rust strings don't have a nul terminator; their length is always
+//! stored and does not need to be calculated. While in Rust
+//! accessing a string's length is an *O*(1) operation (because the
+//! length is stored); in C it is an *O*(*n*) operation because the
+//! length needs to be computed by scanning the string for the nul
+//! terminator.
+//!
+//! * **Internal nul characters** - When C strings have a nul
+//! terminator character, this usually means that they cannot have nul
+//! characters in the middle — a nul character would essentially
+//! truncate the string. Rust strings *can* have nul characters in
+//! the middle, because nul does not have to mark the end of the
+//! string in Rust.
+//!
+//! # Representations of non-Rust strings
+//!
+//! [`CString`] and [`CStr`] are useful when you need to transfer
+//! UTF-8 strings to and from languages with a C ABI, like Python.
+//!
+//! * **From Rust to C:** [`CString`] represents an owned, C-friendly
+//! string: it is nul-terminated, and has no internal nul characters.
+//! Rust code can create a [`CString`] out of a normal string (provided
+//! that the string doesn't have nul characters in the middle), and
+//! then use a variety of methods to obtain a raw <code>\*mut [u8]</code> that can
+//! then be passed as an argument to functions which use the C
+//! conventions for strings.
+//!
+//! * **From C to Rust:** [`CStr`] represents a borrowed C string; it
+//! is what you would use to wrap a raw <code>\*const [u8]</code> that you got from
+//! a C function. A [`CStr`] is guaranteed to be a nul-terminated array
+//! of bytes. Once you have a [`CStr`], you can convert it to a Rust
+//! <code>&[str]</code> if it's valid UTF-8, or lossily convert it by adding
+//! replacement characters.
+//!
+//! [`String`]: crate::string::String
+//! [`CStr`]: core::ffi::CStr
+
+#![stable(feature = "alloc_ffi", since = "1.64.0")]
+
+#[stable(feature = "alloc_c_string", since = "1.64.0")]
+pub use self::c_str::FromVecWithNulError;
+#[stable(feature = "alloc_c_string", since = "1.64.0")]
+pub use self::c_str::{CString, IntoStringError, NulError};
+
+mod c_str;