Module bitvec::domain

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§Memory Region Description

This module bridges the abstract BitSlice region to real memory by segmenting any bit-slice along its maybe-aliased and known-unaliased boundaries. This segmentation applies to both bit-slice and ordinary-element views of memory, and can be used to selectively remove alias restrictions or to enable access to the underlying memory with ordinary types.

The four enums in this module all intentionally have the same variants by name and shape, in order to maintain textual consistency.

§Memory Layout Model

Any bit-slice resident in memory has one of two major kinds, which the enums in this module refer to as Enclave and Region

§Enclave

An Enclave layout occurs when a bit-slice is contained entirely within a single memory element, and does not include either the initial or final semantic index in its span.

[ 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 ]
[     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^     ]

In an 8-bit element, a bit-slice is considered to be an Enclave if it is contained entirely in the marked interior bits, and touches neither bit 7 nor bit 0. Wider elements may touch interior byte boundaries, and only restrict bits 0 and width - 1.

§Region

A Region layout occurs when a bit-slice consists of:

  • zero or one half-spanned head element (excludes bit 0, includes width - 1)
  • zero or more fully-spanned elements body (includes both 0 and width - 1)
  • zero or one half-spanned tail element (includes bit 0, excludes width - 1)

Each of these three sections is optionally present independently of the other two. That is, in the following three bytes, all of the following bit-slices have the Region layout:

[ 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 ] [ 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 ] [ 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 ]
[                                                         ]

[         h h h h                                         ]
[                     b b b b b b b b                     ]
[                                         t t t t         ]

[         h h h h     t t t t                             ]

[         h h h h     b b b b b b b b                     ]
[                     b b b b b b b b     t t t t         ]
[         h h h h     b b b b b b b b     t t t t         ]
  1. The empty bit-slice is a region with all of its segments blank.
  2. A bit-slice with one element that touches width - 1 but not 0 has a head, but no body or tail.
  3. A bit-slice that touches both 0 and width - 1 of any number of elements has a body, but no head or tail.
  4. A bit-slice with one element that touches 0 but not width - 1 has a tail, but no head or body.
  5. A bit-slice with two elements, that touches neither 0 of the first nor width - 1 of the second (but by definition width - 1 of the first and 0 of the second; bit-slices are contiguous) has a head and tail, but no body.

The final three rows show how the individual segments can be composed to describe all possible bit-slices.

§Aliasing Awareness

The contiguity property of BitSlice combines with the &/&mut exclusion rules of the Rust language to provide additional information about the state of the program that allows a given bit-slice to exist.

Specifically, any well-formed Rust program knows that if a bit-slice is able to produce a Region.body segment, then that body is not aliased by bitvec, and can safely transition to the T::Unalias state. Alias-permitting types like Cell and the atomics will never change their types (because bitvec cannot know that there are no views to a region other than what it has been given), but a tainted BitSlice<O, u8::Alias> bit-slice can revert its interior body back to u8 and no longer require the alias tainting.

The head and tail segments do not retain their history, and cannot tell whether they have been created by splitting or by shrinking, so they do not change their types at all.

§Raw Memory Access

The BitDomain enum only splits a bit-slice along these boundaries, and allows a bit-slice view to safely shed aliasing protection added to it by .split_at_mut().

The Domain enum completely sheds its bit-precision views, and reverts to ordinary element accesses. The body segment is an ordinary Rust slice with no additional information or restriction; it can be freely used without regard for any of bitvec’s constraints.

In order to preserve the rules that any given bit-slice can never be used to affect bits outside of its own view of memory, the underlying memory of the head and tail segments is only made accessible through a PartialElement reference guard. This guard is an opaque proxy to the memory location, and holds both a reference and the bit-mask required to prevent reading from or writing to the bits outside the scope of the originating bit-slice.

§Generics

This module, and the contents of ptr, make extensive use of a trait-level mutability and reference tracking system in order to reduce code duplication and provide a more powerful development environment than would be achieved with macros.

As such, the trait bounds on types in this module are more intense than the standard <T, O> fare in the crate’s main data structures. However, they are only ever instantiated with shared or exclusive references, and all of the bounds are a much more verbose way of saying “a reference, that is maybe-mut and maybe-slice, of T”.

User code does not need to be aware of any of this: the BitSlice APIs that call into this module always result in structures where the complex bounds are reduced to ordinary slice references.

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