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Convert structures to and from packed representavises - byte arrays of fixed size that live on stack.

You can use them to read the structures from a std::io::Reader or write them to a std::io::Writer with a single read or write call.

Motivation

When reading structured data into a Rust struct (such as a header from a file), one might be tempted to simply do the following:

use std::io;

struct MyStruct {
    version: u8,
    kind: u16,
    matrix: [i32; 16]
}

// Do not do this
fn read_my_struct<R: io::Read>(reader: &mut R) -> io::Result<MyStruct> {
    let mut bytes = [0; std::mem::size_of::<MyStruct>()];
    reader.read_exact(&mut bytes)?;
    Ok(unsafe { std::mem::transmute(bytes) })
}

The unsafe is not OK! The memory alignment of the Rust struct typically contains some padding after fields, whereas data in the file is tightly packed, one piece after another. Therefore, it is safe only if the struct is repr(packed), which appart from being suboptimal for performance can cause undefined behaviour on some platforms. Moreover, endianness of the data must match the endianness of the platform.

This crate essentially allows doing the preceding, but safely (no unsafe used!), by converting structs to and from packed byte representatives. This is done via the ToBytes and FromBytes traits, which can be automatically derived for most structs. Compare:

use std::io;
use packbytes::{FromBytes, ByteArray};

#[derive(FromBytes)]
struct MyStruct {
    version: u8,
    kind: u16,
    matrix: [i32; 16]
}

fn read_my_struct<R: io::Read>(reader: &mut R) -> io::Result<MyStruct> {
    let mut bytes = [0; <MyStruct as FromBytes>::Bytes::SIZE];
    reader.read_exact(&mut bytes)?;
    Ok(MyStruct::from_bytes(bytes))
}

The from_bytes and to_bytes methods can be considered as unpacking and packing the structure to and from its native in memory representation.

For convenience, to read and write like this, the methods read_packed and write_packed are provided.

When not every sequence of bytes represents valid data (such as when a field can attain just a small set of values), the trait TryFromBytes may be used.

Endianness

By default, the FromBytes and ToBytes derive macros assume that the data is prefered to be stored in the little endian order, and this is what is used by the from_bytes and to_bytes methods. You can change this by setting the attribute #[packbytes(be)] for big endian or #[packbytes(ne)] for the platform native endian.

no_std support

Appart from the convenience methods, everything in this crate does not require std. The std feature can be turned off. In fact, as everything happens on the stack, not even alloc is required.