How to get pointer offset in bytes?
TL;DR: This answer invokes Undefined Behavior, according to RFC-2582.
In particular, references must be aligned and dereferencable, even when they are created and never used.
There are also discussions that field accesses themselves impose extra requirements not solved by the proposed &raw
, due to usage of getelementptr inbounds
, see offsetof
woes at the bottom of the RFC.
From the answer I linked to your previous question:
macro_rules! offset_of {
($ty:ty, $field:ident) => {
// Undefined Behavior: dereferences a null pointer.
// Undefined Behavior: accesses field outside of valid memory area.
unsafe { &(*(0 as *const $ty)).$field as *const _ as usize }
}
}
fn main() {
let p: *const Baz = 0x1248 as *const _;
let p2: *const Foo = ((p as usize) - offset_of!(Foo, memberB)) as *const _;
println!("{:p}", p2);
}
We can see on the computation of p2
that a pointer can be converted painless to an integer (usize
here), on which arithmetic is performed, and then the result is cast back to a pointer.
isize
and usize
are the universal byte-sized pointer types :)
Were RFC-2582 to be accepted, this implementation of offset_of!
is my best shot:
macro_rules! offset_of {
($ty:ty, $field:ident) => {
unsafe {
// Create correctly sized storage.
//
// Note: `let zeroed: $ty = ::std::mem::zeroed();` is incorrect,
// a zero pattern is not always a valid value.
let buffer = ::std::mem::MaybeUninit::<$ty>::uninit();
// Create a Raw reference to the storage:
// - Alignment does not matter, though is correct here.
// - It safely refers to uninitialized storage.
//
// Note: using `&raw const *(&buffer as *const _ as *const $ty)`
// is incorrect, it creates a temporary non-raw reference.
let uninit: &raw const %ty = ::std::mem::transmute(&buffer);
// Create a Raw reference to the field:
// - Alignment does not matter, though is correct here.
// - It points within the memory area.
// - It safely refers to uninitialized storage.
let field = &raw const uninit.$field;
// Compute the difference between pointers.
(field as *const _ as usize) - (uninit as *const_ as usize)
}
}
}
I have commented each step with the reasons I believe they are sound, and why some alternatives are not -- something I encourage heavily in unsafe code -- and hopefully not missed anything.