A feature for types only

[elichai]

Hi,

Would people be in favor of a feature for only types? i.e. no function definitions, just getting all the typedefs.

This can be useful for me here rust-lang/rfcs#2610 (comment)

Although I'm still debating if I should maintain my own list of typedefs for the kernel, flags etc.

How do people feel about this?

[gnzlbg]

I started working on this, but other things came in the way: #1286

[elichai]

I was actually thinking to also includes the flag types
i.e. F_SETFL

[gnzlbg]

What problem are you trying to solve ?

[elichai]

I'm mostly worried i'll accidentally use an extern "C" static typess instead of a typedef.

[gnzlbg]

Why can't you write a wrapper crate over libc that only re-exports what you want ?

[elichai]

that might be an option. but even then i'll need to always check the types i'm re-exporting are still just typedefs(or structs?) but not a link.

[gnzlbg]

Sure, you'd have to do that.

I personally do not think it is worth it to introduce complexity for this in the libc crate when the motivation appears to be to implement a Rust target that does not use this crate, and once that is achieved, all this complexity wouldn't be required.

The libc crate does, however, have very strong backward compatibility guarantees, so we couldn't just remove this complexity later.

[elichai]

That's fair.
I can try to help with #1286 if you can point me to what missing. because I know of a bunch of crates that would like that use case.

[gnzlbg]

In the mean time you can just use the cty crate from crates.io.

The issues related to that PR are more organizational than implementation-related.

(I'm closing this, but please feel free to re-open if you think there is something else we can do here)