Creating a static C struct containing strings

问题:

I'm trying to create a dynamic library in Rust that exports a struct as a symbol that will be loaded into a C program via dlopen().

However, I'm was running into some segfaults when accessing the second string in the struct, so I made a small test program to try figure out what I'm doing wrong.

This is the Rust code (test.rs), compiled with "rustc --crate-type dylib test.rs":

#[repr(C)]
pub struct PluginDesc {
    name: &'static str,
    version: &'static str,
    description: &'static str
}


#[no_mangle]
pub static PLUGIN_DESC: PluginDesc = PluginDesc {
    name: "Test Plugin\0",
    version: "1.0\0",
    description: "Test Rust Plugin\0"
};

and here is the C program that attempts to load the library (test.c), compiled with "gcc test.c -ldl -o test":

#include <dlfcn.h>
#include <stdio.h>


typedef struct {
    const char *name;
    const char *version;
    const char *description;
} plugin_desc;


int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    void *handle;
    plugin_desc *desc;

    handle = dlopen("./libtest.so", RTLD_LOCAL | RTLD_LAZY);
    if (!handle) {
        printf("failed to dlopen: %s\n", dlerror());
        return 1;
    }

    desc = (plugin_desc *) dlsym(handle, "PLUGIN_DESC");
    if (!desc) {
        printf("failed to dlsym: %s\n", dlerror());
        return 1;
    }

    printf("name: %p\n", desc->name);
    printf("version: %p\n", desc->version);
    printf("description: %p\n", desc->description);

    return 0;
}

This is the output:

name: 0x7fa59ef8d750
version: 0xc
description: 0x7fa59ef8d75c

As you can see, the address of desc->version is actually 0xc (12), which is the length of the first string. So it looks like the struct that gets packed into the library also contains the string length after the memory address.

Am I using the wrong string type here? As you can see I had to also make the strings NULL terminated manually. I tried to use the CString wrapper but that does not seem to work in this case ("static items are not allowed to have destructors").

I'm running the latest Rust nightly on Linux:

$ rustc --version
rustc 0.12.0-pre-nightly (f8426e2e2 2014-09-16 02:26:01 +0000)

回答1:

The layout of a slice (&[T] or &str) is a pointer followed by a length, as documented by the Slice struct of the std::raw module. That's why reading the version field from your C code shows the length of the name field's value. (Note, however, that the exact memory layout of slices is not considered stable, so it might change in a later version. In any case, you should not pass Rust-specific data types to C; only pass primitive types – which includes raw pointers – and types annotated with #[repr(C)].)

EDIT: Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to do this in Rust for now. There are functions to get raw pointers from slices, but function calls are not allowed in static initializers. As suggested by sellibitze in the comments, you should define that variable in a C source file.

回答2:

The short answer is that you can't statically allocate such a struct. Future Rust will probably gain this ability.

What you can do, is statically allocate a struct that contains null pointers, and set those null pointers to something useful when you call the function. Rust has static mut. It requires unsafe code, is not threadsafe at all and is (to the best of my knowledge) considered a code smell.

Right here I consider it a workaround to the fact that there is no way to turn a &[T] into a *const T in a static.

static S: &'static [u8] = b"http://example.org/eg-amp_rust\n\0";
static mut desc: LV2Descriptor = LV2Descriptor {
    amp_uri: 0 as *const libc::c_char, // ptr::null() isn't const fn (yet)
};

#[no_mangle]
pub extern fn lv2_descriptor(index: i32) -> *const LV2Descriptor {
     let ptr = S.as_ptr() as *const libc::c_char;
     unsafe {
        desc.amp_uri = ptr;
        &desc as *const LV2Descriptor
     }
}

answer copied from duplicate question