Feature Name: repr_align
Start Date: 2015-11-09
RFC PR: rust-lang/rfcs#1358
Rust Issue: rust-lang/rust#33626

Summary

Extend the existing #[repr] attribute on structs with an align = "N" option to specify a custom alignment for struct types.

Motivation

The alignment of a type is normally not worried about as the compiler will “do the right thing” of picking an appropriate alignment for general use cases. There are situations, however, where a nonstandard alignment may be desired when operating with foreign systems. For example these sorts of situations tend to necessitate or be much easier with a custom alignment:

Hardware can often have obscure requirements such as “this structure is aligned to 32 bytes” when it in fact is only composed of 4-byte values. While this can typically be manually calculated and managed, it’s often also useful to express this as a property of a type to get the compiler to do a little extra work instead.
C compilers like gcc and clang offer the ability to specify a custom alignment for structures, and Rust can much more easily interoperate with these types if Rust can also mirror the request for a custom alignment (e.g. passing a structure to C correctly is much easier).
Custom alignment can often be used for various tricks here and there and is often convenient as “let’s play around with an implementation” tool. For example this can be used to statically allocate page tables in a kernel or create an at-least cache-line-sized structure easily for concurrent programming.

Currently these sort of situations are possible in Rust but aren’t necessarily the most ergonomic as programmers must manually manage alignment. The purpose of this RFC is to provide a lightweight annotation to alter the compiler-inferred alignment of a structure to enable these situations much more easily.

Detailed design

The #[repr] attribute on structs will be extended to include a form such as:

#[repr(align = "16")]
struct MoreAligned(i32);

This structure will still have an alignment of 16 (as returned by mem::align_of), and in this case the size will also be 16.

Syntactically, the repr meta list will be extended to accept a meta item name/value pair with the name “align” and the value as a string which can be parsed as a u64. The restrictions on where this attribute can be placed along with the accepted values are:

Custom alignment can only be specified on struct declarations for now. Specifying a different alignment on perhaps enum or type definitions should be a backwards-compatible extension.
Alignment values must be a power of two.

Multiple #[repr(align = "..")] directives are accepted on a struct declaration, and the actual alignment of the structure will be the maximum of all align directives and the natural alignment of the struct itself.

Semantically, it will be guaranteed (modulo unsafe code) that custom alignment will always be respected. If a pointer to a non-aligned structure exists and is used then it is considered unsafe behavior. Local variables, objects in arrays, statics, etc, will all respect the custom alignment specified for a type.

For now, it will be illegal for any #[repr(packed)] struct to transitively contain a struct with #[repr(align)]. Specifically, both attributes cannot be applied on the same struct, and a #[repr(packed)] struct cannot transitively contain another struct with #[repr(align)]. The flip side, including a #[repr(packed)] structure inside of a #[repr(align)] one will be allowed. The behavior of MSVC and gcc differ in how these properties interact, and for now we’ll just yield an error while we get experience with the two attributes.

Some examples of #[repr(align)] are:

// Raising alignment
#[repr(align = "16")]
struct Align16(i32);

assert_eq!(mem::align_of::<Align16>(), 16);
assert_eq!(mem::size_of::<Align16>(), 16);

// Lowering has no effect
#[repr(align = "1")]
struct Align1(i32);

assert_eq!(mem::align_of::<Align1>(), 4);
assert_eq!(mem::size_of::<Align1>(), 4);

// Multiple attributes take the max
#[repr(align = "8", align = "4")]
#[repr(align = "16")]
struct AlignMany(i32);

assert_eq!(mem::align_of::<AlignMany>(), 16);
assert_eq!(mem::size_of::<AlignMany>(), 16);

// Raising alignment may not alter size.
#[repr(align = "8")]
struct Align8Many {
    a: i32,
    b: i32,
    c: i32,
    d: u8,
}

assert_eq!(mem::align_of::<Align8Many>(), 8);
assert_eq!(mem::size_of::<Align8Many>(), 16);

Drawbacks

Specifying a custom alignment isn’t always necessarily easy to do so via a literal integer value. It may require usage of #[cfg_attr] in some situations and may otherwise be much more convenient to name a different type instead. Working with a raw integer, however, should provide the building block for building up other abstractions and should be maximally flexible. It also provides a relatively straightforward implementation and understanding of the attribute at hand.

This also currently does not allow for specifying the custom alignment of a struct field (as C compilers also allow doing) without the usage of a newtype structure. Currently #[repr] is not recognized here, but it would be a backwards compatible extension to start reading it on struct fields.

Alternatives

Instead of using the #[repr] attribute as the “house” for the custom alignment, there could instead be a new #[align = "..."] attribute. This is perhaps more extensible to alignment in other locations such as a local variable (with attributes on expressions), a struct field (where #[repr] is more of an “outer attribute”), or enum variants perhaps.

Unresolved questions