Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
mention how unions interact with dropping
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
  • Loading branch information
RalfJung committed Oct 18, 2020
1 parent e526381 commit 0c8df59
Show file tree
Hide file tree
Showing 2 changed files with 11 additions and 1 deletion.
10 changes: 10 additions & 0 deletions src/items/unions.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -79,6 +79,16 @@ u.f1 = 2;
Commonly, code using unions will provide safe wrappers around unsafe union
field accesses.

## Unions and `Drop`

When a union is dropped, it cannot know which of its fields needs to be dropped.
For this reason, all union fields must either be of a `Copy` type or of the
shape `ManuallyDrop<_>`. This ensures that a union does not need to drop
anything when it goes out of scope.

Like for structs and enums, it is possible to `impl Drop` for a union to
manually define what happens when it gets dropped.

## Pattern matching on unions

Another way to access union fields is to use pattern matching. Pattern matching
Expand Down
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion src/types/union.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ a [`union` item][item].
Unions have no notion of an "active field". Instead, every union access
transmutes parts of the content of the union to the type of the accessed
field. Since transmutes can cause unexpected or undefined behaviour, `unsafe` is
required to read from a union field or to write to a field that doesn't
required to read from a union field, or to write to a field that doesn't
implement [`Copy`]. See the [item] documentation for further details.

The memory layout of a `union` is undefined by default, but the `#[repr(...)]`
Expand Down

0 comments on commit 0c8df59

Please sign in to comment.