The Ferrilab Project
SectionsThe Ferrilab project is a collection of my work that has spun out of developing my primary project, bitvec. At the moment it is composed of these crates:
funty and radium were extracted from bitvec and are usable on their own.
Each of these crates are described in more detail on their own pages.
funty
Short for fundamental types, this crate provides traits that unify the language primitives (integers, floating-point numbers, bool, char, and pointers) so that code can be generic over them.
With the initial stabilization of Generic Associated Types in Rust 1.65, I was able to pull the trait-level pointer permission system I sketched in bitvec out into funty and create a Pointer<T: ?Sized, P: Permisison> type that generically unifies *const T and *mut T and correctly adheres to Rust’s and Miri’s rules about permission tracking, and Pointer even switches between storing a *const T and *mut T internally as appropriate, so that code analysis tools can understand what is going on without needing to understand the Permission trait.
The standard library APIs for the primitives, especially pointers, continues to evolve. funty tracks it as best I am able to do, and tries to in general remain about four releases behind current. This will not always be true, as I may decide to use major advances in the language.
radium
Originally sketched out by Nika Layzell, radium provides trait unification over Atomic and Cell<> types. The Radium trait can be taken as a generic bound to accept a type which may or may not be atomic, and the Item associated type describes the primitive being managed.
Additionally, radium provides the Atom<T>, Isotope<T>, and Radon<T> type families. These take a primitive integer as their type parameter, and forward to the corresponding atomic, maybe-atomic, or Cell<>, respectively.
The Isotope type family uses platform support information to determine whether it forwards to an Atomic or to a Cell. You can use this to have a single unchanging name that changes behavior according to the target without needing to personally remember where your code can and can’t run.
bitvec
This is my most prominent work. It implements bit-precision addressing, allowing the creation of arbitrary bitfields, compact usize => bool collections, and I/O protocol buffer manipulation.
It works by encoding an intra-byte bit index into part of a slice pointer, so that memory can be described by &/mut BitSlice references rather than Bits<'a> struct handles. The creation of custom reference types allows the crate to implement the vast majority of Rust’s APIs, as everywhere that requires an actual reference rather than just a borrowing view can still receive bitvec types.