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sokoban-bindings: using sokoban in C/C++/Zig

Rust offers a powerful type system with generics, similar to C++ templates. However, structs and functions with generics cannot be used in C via FFI without monomorphization (i.e. picking a single instance of the generic type or function). This crate defines a macro for the red black tree in sokoban that facilitates such monomorphization, exposing a simple C-compatible interface for tree initialization, insertion, removal, and retrieval.

This helper macro is defined in sokoban-bindings, and an example of its use is provided in sokoban-bindings-example.

Usage

The sokoban-bindgen crate defines the monomorphization helper macro. You must use this macro in your own rust library via

red_black_tree_bindings!(key_type, value_type, capacity);

This will define C-compatible types and functions that use the monomorphized sokoban types and methods.

You will need

  • lib-sokoban
  • The cbindgen crate to generate the C headers, with nightly since the expand feature requres it. (The sokoban-bindgen macro must be expanded before cbindgen can parse and generate headers)
  • The concat-idents crate. This is re-exported within sokoban-bindgen, so you can get it via use sokoban_bindgen::*.

The sokoban-bindings-example example

This crate shows how to generate the staticlib and use the bindgen macro and cbindgen to generate a C header for sokoban. In particular, you should note:

  1. The build.rs within the crate
  2. The staticlib option specified within the [lib] section of the Cargo.toml
  3. The use of use sokoban_bindgen::*, which imports the concat_idents macro with a particular name

To use the example in C or Zig:

  1. To build the static library and header via cargo, use cargo +nightly build --release -p sokoban-bindings-example. Nightly is required for macro expansion. The header will be written to examples/c/sokoban.h .

To build and run the C example: The makefile provided will do the same thing as step 1 when make is invoked, in addition to building the C example. The executable will be written to examples/c/sokoban.out.

To run the Zig Example: After building the static library and header via step 1 or via make, navigate to examples/zig and zig build run.

Notes

  1. Option<T> is used by sokoban to communicate insertion and retrieval success and failure, but it is not FFI safe. Two values SUCCESS = 0 and FAILURE = u32::MAX were introduced to deal with this1. In lieu of an Option, these values communicates to the C or Zig application that an attempt to insert or retrieve a value failed or succeeded. As an example, for the red black tree:

    1. Instead of insert returning an Option<u32> node address which is None when insertion fails, the function returns FAILURE if it failed to insert or the node address (also a u32) if it succeeded.
    2. Instead of get returning an Option<&V>, or remove returning an Option<V>, the function accepts a pointer to which the value will be copied if successful, along with SUCCESS = 0. If the retrieval fails, FAILURE = u32::MAX is returned and the pointer remains untouched (and perhaps uninitialized!).

Footnotes

  1. This limits the capacity of the node allocator to one less than its max value. ↩