Is there an idiomatic way of initialising arrays in Rust. I'm creating an array of random numbers and was wondering if there is a more idiomatic way then just doing a for loop. My current code works fine, but seems more like C than proper Rust:
let mut my_array: [u64; 8] = [0; 8];
for i in 0..my_array.len() {
my_array[i] = some_function();
}
Various sized arrays can be directly randomly generated:
use rand; // 0.7.3
fn main() {
let my_array: [u64; 8] = rand::random();
println!("{:?}", my_array);
}
Currently, this only works for arrays of size from 0 to 32 (inclusive). Beyond that, you will want to see related questions:
How can I initialize an array using a function?
What is the proper way to initialize a fixed length array?
The other solution is nice and short, but does not apply to the case where you need to initialize an array of random numbers in a specific range. So, here's an answer that addresses that case.
use rand::{thread_rng, Rng};
fn main() {
let a = [(); 8].map(|_| thread_rng().gen_range(0.0..1.0));
println!("The array of random float numbers between 0.0 and 1.0 is: {:?}", a);
}
I would be happy to know if there's a better (shorter and more efficient) solution than this one.
Related
I'm getting into Rust and Arduino at the same time.
I was programming my LCD display to show a long string by rotating it through the top column of characters. Means: Every second I shift all characters by one position and show the new String.
This was fairly complex in the Arduino language, especially because I had to know the size of the String at compile time (given my limited knowledge).
Since I'd like to use Rust in the long term, I was curious to see if that could be done more easily in a modern language. Not so much.
This is the code I came up with, after hours of experimentation:
#![no_std]
extern crate alloc;
use alloc::{vec::Vec};
fn main() {
}
fn rotate_by<T: Copy>(rotate: Vec<T>, by: isize) -> Vec<T> {
let real_by = modulo(by, rotate.len() as isize) as usize;
Vec::from_iter(rotate[real_by..].iter().chain(rotate[..real_by].iter()).cloned())
}
fn modulo(a: isize, b: isize) -> isize {
a - b * (a as f64 /b as f64).floor() as isize
}
mod tests {
use super::*;
#[test]
fn test_rotate_five() {
let chars: Vec<_> = "I am the string and you should rotate me! ".chars().collect();
let res_chars: Vec<_> = "the string and you should rotate me! I am ".chars().collect();
assert_eq!(rotate_by(chars, 5), res_chars);
}
}
My questions are:
Could you provide an optimized version of this function? I'm aware that there already is Vec::rotate but it uses unsafe code and can panic, which I would like to avoid (by returning a Result).
Explain whether or not it is possible to achieve this in-place without unsafe code (I failed).
Is Vec<_> the most efficient data structure to work with? I tried hard to use [char], which I thought would be more efficient, but then I have to know the size at compile time, which hardly works. I thought Rust arrays would be similar to Java arrays, which can be sized at runtime yet are also fixed size once created, but they seem to have a lot more constraints.
Oh and also what happens if I index into a vector at an invalid index? Will it panic? Can I do this better? Without "manually" checking the validity of the slice indices?
I realize that's a lot of questions, but I'm struggling and this is bugging me a lot, so if somebody could set me straight it would be much appreciated!
You can use slice::rotate_left and slice::rotate_right:
#![no_std]
extern crate alloc;
use alloc::vec::Vec;
fn rotate_by<T>(data: &mut [T], by: isize) {
if by > 0 {
data.rotate_left(by.unsigned_abs());
} else {
data.rotate_right(by.unsigned_abs());
}
}
I made it rotate in-place because that is more efficient. If you don't want to do it in-place you still have the option of cloning the vector first, so this is more flexible than if the function creates a new vector, as you have done, because you aren't be able to opt out of that when you call it.
Notice that rotate_by takes a mutable slice, but you can still pass a mutable reference to a vector, because of deref coercion.
#[test]
fn test_rotate_five() {
let mut chars: Vec<_> = "I am the string and you should rotate me! ".chars().collect();
let res_chars: Vec<_> = "the string and you should rotate me! I am ".chars().collect();
rotate_by(&mut chars, 5);
assert_eq!(chars, res_chars);
}
There are some edge cases with moving chars around like this because some valid UTF-8 will contain grapheme clusters that are made up of multiple codepoints (chars in Rust). This will result in strange effects when a grapheme cluster is split between the start and end of the string. For example, rotating "abcdéfghijk" by 5 will result in "efghijkabcd\u{301}", with the acute accent stranded on its own, away from the 'e'.
If your strings are ASCII then you don't have to worry about that, but then you can also just treat them as byte strings anyway:
#[test]
fn test_rotate_five_ascii() {
let mut chars = b"I am the string and you should rotate me! ".clone();
let res_chars = b"the string and you should rotate me! I am ";
rotate_by(&mut chars, 5);
assert_eq!(chars, &res_chars[..]);
}
I have a vector of prices (f64). I would like to compute the highest price.
What is the current easiest and most idiomatic way to compute the max of a collection of f64 in rust ?
There has been some discussion about Ord and f64 but I am not sure what is the most up-to-date and less hacky way to do so.
I rely on the following but I imagined there was some built in operation
let max = prices.iter().fold(None, |r, &n| match r {
Some(p) => Some(f64::max(p, n)),
None => Some(e),
});
(which is just a fold for some free monoid)
I'm unaware of different ways to do so, but I've used the following in the past:
let arr = [1.0, -42.0, 0.0, -5.0, 42.0, 7.0];
let max = arr.iter().copied().fold(f64::NAN, f64::max) // 42.0
As yet another alternative, since Rust 1.59, there's a total_cmp method on f32 and f64 that you could use with max_by.
arr.iter().max_by(|a, b| a.total_cmp(b))
Rust playground
As of Rust 1.43, you can write this:
my_iterator.fold(f64::NEG_INFINITY, f64::max)
Explanation: use f64::NEG_INFINITY as the initial value, as it is the neutral element for the f64::max operation.
An alternative solution, using the popular ordered-float crate, allows you to use the built-in Iterator::max method:
use ordered_float::NotNan; // 2.0.0
let max = arr
.iter()
.copied()
.map(NotNan::new)
.flatten() // ignore NAN values (errors from the previous line)
.max()
.map(NotNan::into_inner);
This is essentially the same as the idiomatic code you would write to find the maximum value from an array of integers:
let max = arr.iter().copied().max();
The difference is that it adds a NotNan wrapper around each value, which implements Ord. After the result is found, it unwraps the values to get at the inner float. You can apply this pattern to most existing code that works with integers, to update it to work with floats instead.
Here's a clean way to do it with an actual vector and no copy operation:
fn main() {
let v: Vec<f64> = vec![-2.2, -7.7, -3.3];
let max = v
.iter()
.fold(f64::NEG_INFINITY, |prev, curr| prev.max(*curr));
assert!(max == -2.2);
println!("{}", max);
}
playground
In this code:
fn unpack_u32(data: &[u8]) -> u32 {
assert_eq!(data.len(), 4);
let res = data[0] as u32 |
(data[1] as u32) << 8 |
(data[2] as u32) << 16 |
(data[3] as u32) << 24;
res
}
fn main() {
let v = vec![0_u8, 1_u8, 2_u8, 3_u8, 4_u8, 5_u8, 6_u8, 7_u8, 8_u8];
println!("res: {:X}", unpack_u32(&v[1..5]));
}
the function unpack_u32 accepts only slices of length 4. Is there any way to replace the runtime check assert_eq with a compile time check?
Yes, kind of. The first step is easy: change the argument type from &[u8] to [u8; 4]:
fn unpack_u32(data: [u8; 4]) -> u32 { ... }
But transforming a slice (like &v[1..5]) into an object of type [u8; 4] is hard. You can of course create such an array simply by specifying all elements, like so:
unpack_u32([v[1], v[2], v[3], v[4]]);
But this is rather ugly to type and doesn't scale well with array size. So the question is "How to get a slice as an array in Rust?". I used a slightly modified version of Matthieu M.'s answer to said question (playground):
fn unpack_u32(data: [u8; 4]) -> u32 {
// as before without assert
}
use std::convert::AsMut;
fn clone_into_array<A, T>(slice: &[T]) -> A
where A: Default + AsMut<[T]>,
T: Clone
{
assert_eq!(slice.len(), std::mem::size_of::<A>()/std::mem::size_of::<T>());
let mut a = Default::default();
<A as AsMut<[T]>>::as_mut(&mut a).clone_from_slice(slice);
a
}
fn main() {
let v = vec![0_u8, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8];
println!("res: {:X}", unpack_u32(clone_into_array(&v[1..5])));
}
As you can see, there is still an assert and thus the possibility of runtime failure. The Rust compiler isn't able to know that v[1..5] is 4 elements long, because 1..5 is just syntactic sugar for Range which is just a type the compiler knows nothing special about.
I think the answer is no as it is; a slice doesn't have a size (or minimum size) as part of the type, so there's nothing for the compiler to check; and similarly a vector is dynamically sized so there's no way to check at compile time that you can take a slice of the right size.
The only way I can see for the information to be even in principle available at compile time is if the function is applied to a compile-time known array. I think you'd still need to implement a procedural macro to do the check (so nightly Rust only, and it's not easy to do).
If the problem is efficiency rather than compile-time checking, you may be able to adjust your code so that, for example, you do one check for n*4 elements being available before n calls to your function; you could use the unsafe get_unchecked to avoid later redundant bounds checks. Obviously you'd need to be careful to avoid mistakes in the implementation.
I had a similar problem, creating a fixed byte-array on stack corresponding to const length of other byte-array (which may change during development time)
A combination of compiler plugin and macro was the solution:
https://github.com/frehberg/rust-sizedbytes
I am reading raw data from a file and I want to convert it to an integer:
fn main() {
let buf: &[u8] = &[0, 0, 0, 1];
let num = slice_to_i8(buf);
println!("1 == {}", num);
}
pub fn slice_to_i8(buf: &[u8]) -> i32 {
unimplemented!("what should I do here?")
}
I would do a cast in C, but what do I do in Rust?
I'd suggest using the byteorder crate (which also works in a no-std environment):
use byteorder::{BigEndian, ReadBytesExt}; // 1.2.7
fn main() {
let mut buf: &[u8] = &[0, 0, 0, 1];
let num = buf.read_u32::<BigEndian>().unwrap();
assert_eq!(1, num);
}
This handles oddly-sized slices and automatically advances the buffer so you can read multiple values.
As of Rust 1.32, you can also use the from_le_bytes / from_be_bytes / from_ne_bytes inherent methods on integers:
fn main() {
let buf = [0, 0, 0, 1];
let num = u32::from_be_bytes(buf);
assert_eq!(1, num);
}
These methods only handle fixed-length arrays to avoid dealing with the error when not enough data is present. If you have a slice, you will need to convert it into an array.
See also:
How to get a slice as an array in Rust?
How to convert a slice into an array reference?
I'd like to give this answer here to commit the following additional details:
A working code snippet which converts slice to integer (two ways to do it).
A working solution in no_std environment.
To keep everything in one place for the people getting here from the search engine.
Without external crates, the following methods are suitable to convert from slices to integer even for no_std build starting from Rust 1.32:
Method 1 (try_into + from_be_bytes)
use core::convert::TryInto;
let src = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7];
// 0x03040506
u32::from_be_bytes(src[2..6].try_into().unwrap());
use core::conver::TryInto is for no_std build. And the way to use the standard crate is the following: use std::convert::TryInto;.
(And about endians it has been already answered, but let me keep it here in one place: from_le_bytes, from_be_bytes, and from_ne_bytes - use them depending on how integer is represented in memory).
Method 2 (clone_from_slice + from_be_bytes)
let src = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7];
let mut dst = [0u8; 4];
dst.clone_from_slice(&src[2..6]);
// 0x03040506
u32::from_be_bytes(dst);
Result
In both cases integer will be equal to 0x03040506.
This custom serialize_deserialize_u8_i32 library will safely convert back and forth between u8 array and i32 array i.e. the serialise function will take all of your u8 values and pack them into i32 values and the deserialise function will take this library’s custom i32 values and convert them back to the original u8 values that you started with.
This was built for a specific purpose, however it may come in handy for other uses; depending on whether you want/need a fast/custom converter like this.
https://github.com/second-state/serialize_deserialize_u8_i32
Here’s my implementation (for a different use case) that discards any additional bytes beyond 8 (and therefore doesn’t need to panic if not exact):
pub fn u64_from_slice(slice: &[u8]) -> u64 {
u64::from_ne_bytes(slice.split_at(8).0.try_into().unwrap())
}
The split_at() method returns a tuple of two slices: one from index 0 until the specified index and the other from the specified index until the end. So by using .0 to access the first member of the tuple returned by .split_at(8), it ensures that only the first 8 bytes are passed to u64::to_ne_bytes(), discarding the leftovers. Then, of course, it calls the try_into method on that .0 tuple member, and .unwrap() since split_at does all the custom panicking for you.
I have a vector data with size unknown at compile time. I want to create a new vector of the exact that size. These variants don't work:
let size = data.len();
let mut try1: Vec<u32> = vec![0 .. size]; //ah, you need compile-time constant
let mut try2: Vec<u32> = Vec::new(size); //ah, there is no constructors with arguments
I'm a bit frustrated - there is no any information in Rust API, book, reference or rustbyexample.com about how to do such simple base task with vector.
This solution works but I don't think it is good to do so, it is strange to generate elements one by one and I don't have need in any exact values of elements:
let mut temp: Vec<u32> = range(0u32, data.len() as u32).collect();
The recommended way of doing this is in fact to form an iterator and collect it to a vector. What you want is not precisely clear, however; if you want [0, 1, 2, …, size - 1], you would create a range and collect it to a vector:
let x = (0..size).collect::<Vec<_>>();
(range(0, size) is better written (0..size) now; the range function will be disappearing from the prelude soon.)
If you wish a vector of zeroes, you would instead write it thus:
let x = std::iter::repeat(0).take(size).collect::<Vec<_>>();
If you merely want to preallocate the appropriate amount of space but not push values onto the vector, Vec::with_capacity(capacity) is what you want.
You should also consider whether you need it to be a vector or whether you can work directly with the iterator.
You can use Vec::with_capacity() constructor followed by an unsafe set_len() call:
let n = 128;
let v: Vec<u32> = Vec::with_capacity(n);
unsafe { v.set_len(n); }
v[12] = 64; // won't panic
This way the vector will "extend" over the uninitialized memory. If you're going to use it as a buffer it is a valid approach, as long as the type of elements is Copy (primitives are ok, but it will break horribly if the type has a destructor).