Modular Bitfields for Rust

Continuous Integration	Documentation	Crates.io	LoC

• no_std: Supports embedded development without std library.
• This crate uses and generates 100% safe Rust code.

Description

Allows to have bitfield structs and enums as bitfield specifiers that work very similar to C and C++ bitfields.

Advantages

• Safety: Macro embraced enums and structs are checked for valid structure during compilation time.
• Speed: Generated code is as fast as handwritten code. (See benchmarks below.)
• Modularity: Enums can be used modular within bitfield structs.

Attribution

Implements the #[bitfield] macros introduced and specified in David Tolnay's procedural macro workshop.

Thanks go to David Tolnay for designing the specification for the macros implemented in this crate.

Usage

Annotate a Rust struct with the #[bitfield] attribute in order to convert it into a bitfield. The B1, B2, ... B128 prelude types can be used as primitives to declare the number of bits per field.

#[bitfield]
pub struct PackedData {
    header: B4,
    body: B9,
    is_alive: B1,
    status: B2,
}

This produces a new constructor as well as a variety of getters and setters that allows to interact with the bitfield in a safe fashion:

Example: Constructors

let data = PackedData::new()
    .with_header(1)
    .with_body(2)
    .with_is_alive(0)
    .with_status(3);
assert_eq!(data.header(), 1);
assert_eq!(data.body(), 2);
assert_eq!(data.is_alive(), 0);
assert_eq!(data.status(), 3);

Example: Primitive Types

Any type that implements the Specifier trait can be used as a bitfield field. Besides the already mentioned B1, .. B128 also the bool, u8, u16, u32, u64 or u128 primitive types can be used from prelude.

We can use this knowledge to encode our is_alive as bool type instead of B1:

#[bitfield]
pub struct PackedData {
    header: B4,
    body: B9,
    is_alive: bool,
    status: B2,
}

let mut data = PackedData::new()
    .with_is_alive(true);
assert!(data.is_alive());
data.set_is_alive(false);
assert!(!data.is_alive());

Example: Enum Specifiers

It is possible to derive the Specifier trait for enum types very easily to make them also usable as a field within a bitfield type:

#[derive(BitfieldSpecifier)]
pub enum Status {
    Red, Green, Yellow, None,
}

#[bitfield]
pub struct PackedData {
    header: B4,
    body: B9,
    is_alive: bool,
    status: Status,
}

Example: Extra Safety Guard

In order to make sure that our Status enum still requires exatly 2 bit we can add #[bits = 2] to its field:

#[bitfield]
pub struct PackedData {
    header: B4,
    body: B9,
    is_alive: bool,
    #[bits = 2]
    status: Status,
}

Setting and getting our new status field is naturally as follows:

let mut data = PackedData::new()
    .with_status(Status::Green);
assert_eq!(data.status(), Status::Green);
data.set_status(Status::Red);
assert_eq!(data.status(), Status::Red);

Example: Recursive Bitfields

It is possible to use #[bitfield] structs as fields of #[bitfield] structs. This is generally useful if there are some common fields for multiple bitfields and is achieved by adding #[derive(BitfieldSpecifier)] to the attributes of the #[bitfield] annotated struct:

#[bitfield]
#[derive(BitfieldSpecifier)]
pub struct Header {
    is_compact: bool,
    is_secure: bool,
    pre_status: Status,
}

#[bitfield]
pub struct PackedData {
    header: Header,
    body: B9,
    is_alive: bool,
    status: Status,
}

With the bits: int parameter of the #[bitfield] macro on the Header struct and the #[bits: int] attribute of the #[derive(BitfieldSpecifier)] on the Status enum we can have additional compile-time guarantees about the bit widths of the resulting entities:

#[derive(BitfieldSpecifier)]
#[bits = 2]
pub enum Status {
    Red, Green, Yellow
}

#[bitfield(bits = 4)]
#[derive(BitfieldSpecifier)]
pub struct Header {
    is_compact: bool,
    is_secure: bool,
    #[bits = 2]
    pre_status: Status,
}

#[bitfield(bits = 16)]
pub struct PackedData {
    #[bits = 4]
    header: Header,
    body: B9,
    is_alive: bool,
    #[bits = 2]
    status: Status,
}

Example: Advanced Enum Specifiers

For our Status enum we actually just need 3 status variants: Green, Yellow and Red. We introduced the None status variants because Specifier enums by default are required to have a number of variants that is a power of two. We can ship around this by specifying #[bits = 2] on the top and get rid of our placeholder None variant while maintaining the invariant of it requiring 2 bits:

# use modular_bitfield::prelude::*;

#[derive(BitfieldSpecifier)]
#[bits = 2]
pub enum Status {
    Red, Green, Yellow,
}

However, having such enums now yields the possibility that a bitfield might contain invalid bit patterns for such fields. We can safely access those fields with protected getters. For the sake of demonstration we will use the generated from_bytes constructor with which we can easily construct bitfields that may contain invalid bit patterns:

let mut data = PackedData::from_bytes([0b0000_0000, 0b1100_0000]);
//           The 2 status field bits are invalid -----^^
//           as Red = 0x00, Green = 0x01 and Yellow = 0x10
assert_eq!(data.status_or_err(), Err(InvalidBitPattern { invalid_bytes: 0b11 }));
data.set_status(Status::Green);
assert_eq!(data.status_or_err(), Ok(Status::Green));

Benchmarks

Below are some benchmarks between the hand-written code and the macro-generated code for some example getters and setters that cover a decent variety of use cases.

We can conclude that the macro-generated code is as fast as hand-written code would be. Please file a PR if you see a way to improve either side.

• cargo bench to run the benchmarks
• cargo test --benches to run the benchmark tests

Click here to view all benchmark results.

Summary

The modular_bitfield crate generates bitfields that are ...

• just as efficient as the handwritten alternatives.
• equally efficient or more efficient than the alternative bitfield crate.

Showcase: Generated vs Handwritten

We tested the following #[bitfield] struct:

#[bitfield]
pub struct Generated {
    pub a: B9,  // Spans 2 bytes.
    pub b: B6,  // Within 2nd byte.
    pub c: B13, // Spans 3 bytes.
    pub d: B1,  // Within 4rd byte.
    pub e: B3,  // Within 4rd byte.
    pub f: B32, // Spans rest 4 bytes.
}

Note: All benchmarks timing results sum 10 runs each.

Getter Performance

get_a/generated     time:   [3.0990 ns 3.1119 ns 3.1263 ns]
get_a/handwritten   time:   [3.1072 ns 3.1189 ns 3.1318 ns]

get_b/generated     time:   [3.0859 ns 3.0993 ns 3.1140 ns]
get_b/handwritten   time:   [3.1062 ns 3.1154 ns 3.1244 ns]

get_c/generated     time:   [3.0892 ns 3.1140 ns 3.1491 ns]
get_c/handwritten   time:   [3.1031 ns 3.1144 ns 3.1266 ns]

get_d/generated     time:   [3.0937 ns 3.1055 ns 3.1182 ns]
get_d/handwritten   time:   [3.1109 ns 3.1258 ns 3.1422 ns]

get_e/generated     time:   [3.1009 ns 3.1139 ns 3.1293 ns]
get_e/handwritten   time:   [3.1217 ns 3.1366 ns 3.1534 ns]

get_f/generated     time:   [3.1064 ns 3.1164 ns 3.1269 ns]
get_f/handwritten   time:   [3.1067 ns 3.1221 ns 3.1404 ns]

Setter Performance

set_a/generated     time:   [15.784 ns 15.855 ns 15.932 ns]
set_a/handwritten   time:   [15.841 ns 15.907 ns 15.980 ns]

set_b/generated     time:   [20.496 ns 20.567 ns 20.643 ns]
set_b/handwritten   time:   [20.319 ns 20.384 ns 20.454 ns]

set_c/generated     time:   [19.155 ns 19.362 ns 19.592 ns]
set_c/handwritten   time:   [19.265 ns 19.383 ns 19.523 ns]

set_d/generated     time:   [12.325 ns 12.376 ns 12.429 ns]
set_d/handwritten   time:   [12.416 ns 12.472 ns 12.541 ns]

set_e/generated     time:   [20.460 ns 20.528 ns 20.601 ns]
set_e/handwritten   time:   [20.473 ns 20.534 ns 20.601 ns]

set_f/generated     time:   [6.1466 ns 6.1769 ns 6.2127 ns]
set_f/handwritten   time:   [6.1467 ns 6.1962 ns 6.2670 ns]

License

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this codebase by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.