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Don’t recommend empty enums for opaque types #82

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21 changes: 16 additions & 5 deletions src/ffi.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -737,11 +737,11 @@ void foo(struct Foo *arg);
void bar(struct Bar *arg);
```

To do this in Rust, let’s create our own opaque types with `enum`:
To do this in Rust, let’s create our own opaque types:

```rust
pub enum Foo {}
pub enum Bar {}
#[repr(C)] pub struct Foo { _private: [u8; 0] }
#[repr(C)] pub struct Bar { _private: [u8; 0] }

extern "C" {
pub fn foo(arg: *mut Foo);
Expand All @@ -750,7 +750,18 @@ extern "C" {
# fn main() {}
```

By using an `enum` with no variants, we create an opaque type that we can’t
instantiate, as it has no variants. But because our `Foo` and `Bar` types are
By including a private field and no constructor,
we create an opaque type that we can't instantiate outside of this module.
(A struct with no field could be instantiated by anyone.)
We also want to use this type in FFI, so we have to add `#[repr(C)]`.
And to avoid warning around using `()` in FFI, we instead use an empty array,
which works just as well as an empty type but is FFI-compatible.

But because our `Foo` and `Bar` types are
different, we’ll get type safety between the two of them, so we cannot
accidentally pass a pointer to `Foo` to `bar()`.

Notice that it is a really bad idea to use an empty enum as FFI type.
The compiler relies on empty enums being uninhabited, so handling values of type
`&Empty` is a huge footgun and can lead to buggy program behavior (by triggering
undefined behavior).