Constant Assertions

Have you ever wanted to assert things even before runtime? We all have, of course. Particularly when the runtime machine is a poor little GBA, we'd like to have the machine doing the compile handle as much checking as possible.

Enter the static assertions crate, which provides a way to let you assert on a const expression.

This is an amazing crate that you should definitely use when you can.

It's written by Nikolai Vazquez, and they kindly wrote up a blog post that explains the thinking behind it.

However, I promised that each example would be single file, and I also promised to explain what's going on as we go, so we'll briefly touch upon giving an explanation here.

How We Const Assert

Alright, as it stands (2018-12-15), we can't use if in a const context.

Since we can't use if, we can't use a normal assert!. Some day it will be possible, and a failed assert at compile time will be a compile error and a failed assert at run time will be a panic and we'll have a nice unified programming experience. We can add runtime-only assertions by being a little tricky with the compiler.

If we write

const ASSERT: usize = 0 - 1;

that gives a warning, since the math would underflow. We can upgrade that warning to a hard error:

#[deny(const_err)]
const ASSERT: usize = 0 - 1;

And to make our construction reusable we can enable the underscore_const_names feature in our program (or library) and then give each such const an underscore for a name.

#![feature(underscore_const_names)]

#[deny(const_err)]
const _: usize = 0 - 1;

Now we wrap this in a macro where we give a bool expression as input. We negate the bool then cast it to a usize, meaning that true negates into false, which becomes 0usize, and then there's no underflow error. Or if the input was false, it negates into true, then becomes 1usize, and then the underflow error fires.

macro_rules! const_assert {
  ($condition:expr) => {
    #[deny(const_err)]
    #[allow(dead_code)]
    const ASSERT: usize = 0 - !$condition as usize;
  }
}

Technically, written like this, the expression can be anything with a core::ops::Not implementation that can also be as cast into usize. That's bool, but also basically all the other number types. Since we want to ensure that we get proper looking type errors when things go wrong, we can use ($condition && true) to enforce that we get a bool (thanks to Talchas for that particular suggestion).

macro_rules! const_assert {
  ($condition:expr) => {
    #[deny(const_err)]
    #[allow(dead_code)]
    const _: usize = 0 - !($condition && true) as usize;
  }
}

Asserting Something

As an example of how we might use a const_assert, we'll do a demo with colors. There's a red, blue, and green channel. We store colors in a u16 with 5 bits for each channel.

newtype! {
  #[derive(Debug, Clone, Copy, PartialEq, Eq)]
  Color, u16
}

And when we're building a color, we're passing in u16 values, but they could be using more than just 5 bits of space. We want to make sure that each channel is 31 or less, so we can make a color builder that does a const_assert! on the value of each channel.

macro_rules! rgb {
  ($r:expr, $g:expr, $b:expr) => {
    {
      const_assert!($r <= 31);
      const_assert!($g <= 31);
      const_assert!($b <= 31);
      Color($b << 10 | $g << 5 | $r)
    }
  }
}

And then we can declare some colors

const RED: Color = rgb!(31, 0, 0);

const BLUE: Color = rgb!(31, 500, 0);

The second one is clearly out of bounds and it fires an error just like we wanted.

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Constant Assertions

How We Const Assert

Asserting Something

3.8 KiB

Raw Blame History