Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Elaborate on how to use an extern static correctly #736

Merged
merged 3 commits into from
Jan 10, 2020
Merged
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
14 changes: 12 additions & 2 deletions src/items/external-blocks.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -38,6 +38,8 @@ Two kind of item _declarations_ are allowed in external blocks: [functions] and
[statics]. Calling functions or accessing statics that are declared in external
blocks is only allowed in an `unsafe` context.

## Functions

Functions within external blocks are declared in the same way as other Rust
functions, with the exception that they may not have a body and are instead
terminated by a semicolon. Patterns are not allowed in parameters, only
Expand All @@ -53,10 +55,18 @@ extern "abi" for<'l1, ..., 'lm> fn(A1, ..., An) -> R`, where `'l1`, ... `'lm`
are its lifetime parameters, `A1`, ..., `An` are the declared types of its
parameters and `R` is the declared return type.

Statics within external blocks are declared in the same way as statics outside of external blocks,
## Statics

Statics within external blocks are declared in the same way as [statics] outside of external blocks,
except that they do not have an expression initializing their value.
It is `unsafe` to access a static item declared in an extern block, whether or
not it's mutable.
not it's mutable, because there is nothing guaranteeing that the bit pattern at the static's
memory is valid for the type it is declared with, since some arbitrary (e.g. C) code is in charge
of initializing the static.

Extern statics can be either immutable or mutable just like [statics] outside of external blocks.
An immutable static *must* be initialized before any Rust code is executed. It is not enough for
the static to be initialized before Rust code reads from it.

## ABI

Expand Down