Genericity over width

[chrysn]

Writing components that maintain generic CRCs is difficult using this crate because the Width trait is not used to its full extent. While the generic component can demand that a W: Width be specified, many places still require a concrete type because a W: Width is insufficient.

The two places I ran into this was the lack of an .update() on a digest (it's only implemented for the 5 concrete widths) and the .digest() method.

I think that it'd be possible to move to generic implementations and leverage the Width trait; code that currently sits in the concrete implementations would move into Width. The change would almost be compatible: As Width is not sealed, the trait would need to gain non-provided methods. (It's a change that's very unlikely to break any code, as just implementing Width doesn't let a user do anything with it so far, but it's technically still breaking).

As a side effect, the built documentation would become much more usable -- for example, the crc::Crc struct would only have one impl block instead of 5.

[Akhil Velagapudi]

I'd love to make update generic over Width, but unfortunately this is blocked on const fn support in traits. Currently, we can either have a generic implementation of update or a const implementation, but not both.

[James Munns]

For what it's worth, we're adding CRC support to postcard, and it required quite a bit of macros (and paste) to make happen.

I managed to get a more generic approach working with some non-ideal hacks, see: huntc/postcard#1, though I'm likely just going to stick to the paste macros. I wanted to share in case an aspect of this was useful to y'all for implementing generics in the future, or if I could help with any of the impl.

[James Munns]

Extracted, it might be possible to have "best of both worlds" with layering a trait over the Digest type, where the impls are inherent, but there is a (sealed) trait that lets you be generic over it:

pub trait Digestif {
    type Pod: PartialEq;

    fn update(&mut self, data: &[u8]);
    fn finalize(self) -> Self::Pod;
    fn bytes_to_pod(bytes: &[u8]) -> Result<Self::Pod, ()>;
}

macro_rules! impl_digestif {
    ($( $int:ty ),*) => {
        $(
            impl<'a> Digestif for Digest<'a, $int> {
                type Pod = $int;

                #[inline(always)]
                fn update(&mut self, data: &[u8]) {
                    self.update(data);
                }

                #[inline(always)]
                fn finalize(self) -> Self::Pod {
                    self.finalize()
                }

                #[inline]
                fn bytes_to_pod(bytes: &[u8]) -> Result<Self::Pod, ()> {
                    let arr =  bytes.try_into().map_err(drop)?;
                    Ok(<$int>::from_le_bytes(arr))
                }
            }
        )*
    };
}

impl_digestif!(u8, u16, u32, u64, u128);

and can be used downstream something like this:

pub fn from_bytes_width<'a, T, C>(s: &'a [u8], digest: C) -> Result<T>
where
    T: Deserialize<'a>,
    C: Digestif + 'a,
{
    let flav = CrcModifier::new(Slice::new(s), digest);
    let mut deserializer = Deserializer::from_flavor(flav);
    let r = T::deserialize(&mut deserializer)?;
    let _ = deserializer.finalize()?;
    Ok(r)
}