Transmuting u8 buffer to struct in Rust

Question

I have a byte buffer of unknown size, and I want to create a local struct variable pointing to the memory of the beginning of the buffer. Following what I\'d do in C, I trie

Answer 1

You can use methods on raw pointers and functions in std::ptr to directly read/write objects in place.

• std::ptr::read
• std::ptr::read_unaligned
• std::ptr::write
• std::ptr::write_unaligned

In your case:

fn main() {
    let v: Vec = vec![1, 2, 3];
    let s: MyStruct = unsafe { std::ptr::read(v.as_ptr() as *const _) };
    println!("here is the struct: {:?}", s);
}

I would encourage you to wrap this in a reusable method and perform a length check on the source buffer before attempting the read.