Implement Arc/Rc raw pointer conversions for ?Sized

[murarth]

• Add T: ?Sized bound to {Arc,Rc}::{from_raw,into_raw}

[rust-highfive]

r? @BurntSushi

(rust_highfive has picked a reviewer for you, use r? to override)

[murarth]

I believe this change is totally backward compatible and it makes sense with the recently merged From impls to build Rc<str> and Rc<[T]> from &str and &[T]. Users will now be enabled to make more use of Arc/Rc<T> with unsized T and this change to from_raw/into_raw will help with that.

(It was actually a comment on another project referencing that PR which made me aware that from_raw/into_raw were implemented for T: Sized only.)

[BurntSushi]

cc @rust-lang/libs It seems like this is a good thing to have, but I need help reviewing the actual implementation. Could someone describe at a high level what's going on in the from_raw implementations? (Perhaps adding a corresponding comment in the code would be helpful.)

[murarth]

@BurntSushi: The implementation of from_raw works as follows:

First, the definition of struct RcBox<T> looks like this (and ArcInner<T> is basically the same):

struct RcBox<T: ?Sized> {
strong: Cell<usize>,
weak: Cell<usize>,
value: T,
}

So, the implementation works like this:

1. Casts the input *const T to create fake_ptr, a *mut RcBox<T>. This is done so that, for unsized types, we retain the fat pointer's non-data pointer. (This is most important for trait objects as the "vtable" pointer also contains data about alignment, which is required for the compiler to accurately find the offset of the value: T field in RcBox<T>.
2. The "data" pointer of fake_ptr is set to a value equal to the type's alignment. This is a hack I've seen elsewhere. It really just needs to be a non-null value (dereferencing a null pointer is undefined behavior) that correctly aligns the RcBox<T> pointer in memory (unaligned memory access may also be undefined?).
   The code isn't actually dereferencing the pointer, of course. The "data" pointer is only altered to avoid the possibility of overflowing the pointer. Should the input pointer somehow be a value less than two usizes from usize::MAX, it would overflow in calculating the offset to value: T.
   The original implementation (for sized T) didn't run into this issue because the implementation of the private offset_of macro declared an RcBox<T> value on the stack to calculate offset. However, it's not possible to declare RcBox<T> for unsized T on the stack and, besides, the compiler needs the "vtable" pointer at runtime in order to accurately determine the offset.
3. Just as the old implementation did, find the offset of value: T and apply this in reverse to get the true offset of *mut RcBox<T> from the input *const T. Because it uses fake_ptr to find the offset, the compiler will transparently use the original "vtable" pointer of a trait object to determine the true position of that field.

All of the weird trickery is used so that the same code that does the right thing for a trait object T will also work for a slice object or a SizedT.

[cristicbz]

This was discussed in #37197 . We didn't implement it for ?Sized types on purpose, because we couldn't figure out a way to do it without deref-ing an invalid pointer (which seems to be UB according to http://llvm.org/docs/GetElementPtr.html#what-happens-if-an-array-index-is-out-of-bounds).

I'm pretty convinced at this point that the correct way to do this is to have a built-in offsetof like C++ does. Though if you find a way of doing this without deref-ing an invalid pointer, I'd be super happy!

[cristicbz]

cc @Amanieu (they came up with a DST impl before as well, but I don't think anything fundamental has changed)

[Amanieu]

Here's a link to my implementation for reference. It is still technically UB since it derefs an invalid pointer, but it works well enough in practice until we get proper support for offsetof.

[murarth]

Well, shoot. I didn't realize that getting an offset from an invalid pointer was technically a dereference and therefore undefined behavior.

So, it looks like a compiler-supported offset_of may be the only path forward. Is there anything holding that back from being implemented?

[carols10cents]

So, it looks like a compiler-supported offset_of may be the only path forward. Is there anything holding that back from being implemented?

@BurntSushi@cristicbz @rust-lang/libs any of yinz have an answer to @murarth's question? ^^

[BurntSushi]

I'm out of depth on this one. I've assigned it to @alexcrichton

[alexcrichton]

@murarth ah yeah unfortunately I think that may still be holding this back. That being said though I don't think anything is blocking an implementation of offset_of as an intrinsic! If you're curious to implement that, I may be able to help out at least getting the intrinsic definition up and going :)

[murarth]

@alexcrichton: I did run into a few issues trying to implement an offset_of intrinsic. The biggest issue I recall is that the intrinsic implementation requires pulling the literal string value (for the field name) out of its argument and fails if it receives anything else, including a parameter to a const fn. Unless I'm missing something, I think const generics may be required for a sane implementation.

[alexcrichton]

That seems fine to me as an implementation detail for now, but an alternate route could be to use a custom macro like asm! with a custom AST node

[murarth]

If using a custom AST node is more flexible, that's probably a better idea than a weird intrinsic thing. Looking back at my attempted implementation, I realize the problem I ran into:

In order to have offset_of that works in any situation, there need to be two flavors: Classic offset_of, taking a type parameter and field name and yielding a compile-time constant; and what I had termed offset_of_val, which operates on trait objects (or a type containing a trait object, such as in this situation, Rc<T> with T: ?Sized).

Use of offset_of_val requires a *const Trait at runtime, using the size/alignment data in the vtable. This is where the intrinsic implementation strategy got tricky. offset_of_val needs to be evaluated at runtime, but it still needs the field name to be a compile-time constant. By this point in the intrinsic evaluation code, argument values have been reduced to LLVM ValueRef and trying to get a compile-time &str out of that seemed like a bad/impossible idea.

So, TL;DR: I'm not familiar with how AST expressions eventually become code, but I will look into it and see what I can do.

[alexcrichton]

Yeah I think using a custom AST node should help you solve that problem, for example the asm! macro expands to a custom AST variant that's not exposed syntactically in the language which then gets plumbed all the way through HAIR/HIR/MIR down to trans where all the various operands should be preserved to do w/e you need. The macro could then require a type argument and then an identifier for the field where the field is persisted all the way through to the end of compilation. (there could also be a variant that takes an expression perhaps?)

Another route would be to perhaps poke around with constant evaluation with an intrinsic to try to constant evaluate the field argument and that should be able to give you a string I think?

[murarth]

@alexcrichton: I've run into an issue implementing offset_of as an asm!-like macro. When attempting to evaluate ExprKind::OffsetOf as a constant expression (here), a lifetime error arises, apparently from the use of a TyCtxt<'a, 'tcx, 'tcx> (note the double 'tcx) by LayoutCx.

error[E0495]: cannot infer an appropriate lifetime due to conflicting requirements
--> src/librustc_mir/build/expr/as_constant.rs:35:15
|
35 | = expr;
| ^^^^
|
note: first, the lifetime cannot outlive the lifetime 'tcx as defined on the impl at 22:1...
--> src/librustc_mir/build/expr/as_constant.rs:22:1
|
22 | / impl<'a, 'gcx, 'tcx> Builder<'a, 'gcx, 'tcx> {
23 | | /// Compile `expr`, yielding a compile-time constant. Assumes that
24 | | /// `expr` is a valid compile-time constant!
25 | | pub fn as_constant<M>(&mut self, expr: M) -> Constant<'tcx>
... |
70 | | }
71 | | }
| |_^
note: ...so that expression is assignable (expected hair::Expr<'_>, found hair::Expr<'tcx>)
--> src/librustc_mir/build/expr/as_constant.rs:35:15
|
35 | = expr;
| ^^^^
note: but, the lifetime must be valid for the lifetime 'gcx as defined on the impl at 22:1...
--> src/librustc_mir/build/expr/as_constant.rs:22:1
|
22 | / impl<'a, 'gcx, 'tcx> Builder<'a, 'gcx, 'tcx> {
23 | | /// Compile `expr`, yielding a compile-time constant. Assumes that
24 | | /// `expr` is a valid compile-time constant!
25 | | pub fn as_constant<M>(&mut self, expr: M) -> Constant<'tcx>
... |
70 | | }
71 | | }
| |_^
note: ...so that types are compatible (expected &build::Builder<'_, '_, '_>, found &build::Builder<'a, 'gcx, 'tcx>)
--> src/librustc_mir/build/expr/as_constant.rs:42:32
|
42 | let hir = self.hir();
| ^^^

Trying to resolve this by adding a 'gcx parameter to LayoutCx sets off a cascade of new 'gcx parameters, eventually running into another lifetime error that I'm having trouble resolving, in librustc/infer/mod.rs (here):

error[E0495]: cannot infer an appropriate lifetime for lifetime parameter `'a` due to conflicting requirements
--> src/librustc/infer/mod.rs:501:14
|
501 | self.infer_ctxt().enter(|infcx| {
| ^^^^^^^^^^
|
note: first, the lifetime cannot outlive the lifetime 'a as defined on the impl at 473:1...
--> src/librustc/infer/mod.rs:473:1
|
473 | / impl<'a, 'gcx, 'tcx> TyCtxt<'a, 'gcx, 'tcx> {
474 | | /// Currently, higher-ranked type bounds inhibit normalization. Therefore,
475 | | /// each time we erase them in translation, we need to normalize
476 | | /// the contents.
... |
526 | | }
527 | | }
| |_^
note: ...so that types are compatible (expected ty::context::TyCtxt<'_, '_, '_>, found ty::context::TyCtxt<'a, 'gcx, 'tcx>)
--> src/librustc/infer/mod.rs:501:14
|
501 | self.infer_ctxt().enter(|infcx| {
| ^^^^^^^^^^
note: but, the lifetime must be valid for the lifetime 'tcx as defined on the impl at 473:1...
--> src/librustc/infer/mod.rs:473:1
|
473 | / impl<'a, 'gcx, 'tcx> TyCtxt<'a, 'gcx, 'tcx> {
474 | | /// Currently, higher-ranked type bounds inhibit normalization. Therefore,
475 | | /// each time we erase them in translation, we need to normalize
476 | | /// the contents.
... |
526 | | }
527 | | }
| |_^
note: ...so that expression is assignable (expected &infer::InferCtxt<'_, '_, 'tcx>, found &infer::InferCtxt<'_, '_, '_>)
--> src/librustc/infer/mod.rs:502:35
|
502 | value.trans_normalize(&infcx, param_env)
| ^^^^^^

[alexcrichton]

Ah unfortunately I may not be of much help there, but maybe @eddyb can help?

[eddyb]

You can use pointers inside an union instead of invalid ones, to compute offsetof.

[murarth]

@eddyb: I'm not sure what you're talking about. Can you give me an example? And would it work with unsized types, e.g. Rc<Trait>?

[eddyb]

@murarth So the second thing people usually go to when &(*(0 as *T)).field doesn't work is using an uninitialized value of type T on the stack. That's tricky, so one can do the same with unions:

unionMaybeUninitialized<T>{value:T,dummy:()}let uninit:MaybeUninitialized<RcBox<T>> = MaybeUninitialized{dummy:()}

I assume you had a solution for unsized T (for your example it'd be Trait I think?), with the invalid pointer strategy, right? I'd probably just use another union to overwrite the data pointer:

unionFatThin<T: ?Sized>{fat:*mutT,thin:*mut()}letmut combined = FatThin{fat: ptr as*mutRcBox<T>};
combined.thin = &uninit.valueas*const_as*const();let base_ptr = &uninit.valueas*const_asusize;let data_ptr = &(*combined.fat).dataas*const_asusize;let offset = data_ptr - base_ptr;

Oh, I see, writing this, uninit can't be unsized, and if starts out sized the resulting data pointer has to end up inside the allocation still. So while doable, this a bit of a stretch with unsized data.

OTOH, how were you going to pass the fat metadata to the compiler in an offset_of! macro?
If you weren't, then this union strategy should work just fine (assuming you use something like RcBox<()> followed by aligning the offset of .data up to align_of_val(&*ptr)).

[murarth]

offset_of! won't accept an expression. I intend to implement another macro, offset_of_val!, which will accept an expression as its first argument and yield a runtime-computed value. For now, I'm just trying to get the simpler offset_of! macro functionality working.

Manually calculating offset using align_of_val might work, but was discouraged as an implementation strategy in my From<&[T]> for Rc<[T]> PR.

[eddyb]

So you wanted to implemented a safe equivalent of getting the offset by subtracting the ptr argument from &(ptr as *mut RcBox<T>).data?
Also, why was that implementation strategy discouraged? It's not like anything supporting unsized types can actually have a non-deterministic layout, otherwise the unsizing wouldn't always work.

[murarth]

If it's safe to assume now and into the foreseeable future that data will always be at size_of<usize>*2 or align_of_val(&*ptr) (whichever's greater), then I'm fine using that to calculate the position of *mut RcBox<T> and avoid the invalid pointer dereference (and offset_of!) altogether.

@alexcrichton: Would that be acceptable for the implementation of this PR?

[eddyb]

What I meant is more like aligning size_of::<usize>() * 2 to align_of_val(&*ptr), although since the former happens to always be a power of two, you're right this is the maximum of the two.

Also you could use size_of::<RcBox<()>>() instead of assuming its contents (for the unaligned size), or even getting the offset of data from RcBox { ..., data: () } if it's not too ugly.

[murarth]

Yeah, the power of two thing is what I was basing that on, but using size_of::<RcBox<()>> and a generic alignment function works, too.

[alexcrichton]

This all sounds reasonable to me, thanks for the tips @eddyb!

[murarth]

@alexcrichton: Tests passed on the new implementation.

[alexcrichton]

@bors: r+

A great trick!

[bors]

📌 Commit 1cbb2b3 has been approved by alexcrichton

[bors]

⌛ Testing commit 1cbb2b3 with merge 1d2511ea0c6bd20c9f8d843dd60f4f3529b81fd3...

[TimNN]

@bors retry

• prioritising rollup

[bors]

⌛ Testing commit 1cbb2b3 with merge 278c86f8c90c8beb958003c5e3c11923357ee1e9...

[TimNN]

@bors retry

• prioritising rollup

[bors]

⌛ Testing commit 1cbb2b3 with merge 1cdd689...

[cristicbz]

@eddyb@murarth

+ // Align the unsized value to the end of the ArcInner.
+ // Because it is ?Sized, it will always be the last field in memory.
+ let align = align_of_val(&*ptr);
+ let layout = Layout::new::<ArcInner<()>>();
+ let offset = (layout.size() + layout.padding_needed_for(align))asisize;

Hmmm, is this actually correct if T is not unsized and layout randomization/optimization is turned on? I get why it's the last field when actually unsized, but if T is sized, after monomorphisation, is it not possible that data ends up somewhere else?

[eddyb]

@cristicbz a pointer to Struct<T> can be unsized to a pointer to Struct<Trait> iff T: Trait, at which point the data can't be reordered, so all sized layouts have to be compatible with unsized ones.

[cristicbz]

That's interesting... thanks for the explanation. I guess I assumed the vtable somehow implicitly expressed the offset to the unsized field, but I'd never given it much thought.