Re: [PATCH v4 6/6] rust: bitfield: Use 'as' operator for setter type conversion

Alexandre Courbot
2025-09-29T14:45:03Z

On Mon Sep 29, 2025 at 10:59 PM JST, Miguel Ojeda wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 8:23 PM Joel Fernandes <joelagnelf@nvidia.com> wrote:
>>
>> The bitfield macro's setter currently uses the From trait for type
>> conversion, which is overly restrictive and prevents use cases such as
>> narrowing conversions (e.g., u32 storage size to u8 field size) which
>> aren't supported by From.
>
> Being restrictive is a good thing

On that note, I have been wondering whether we should not push the
restriction up to having bounded primitive types with only a set number
of bits valid, e.g. `bound_u8::<2>` is guaranteed to only contain values
in the range `0..=3`.

Getters and setters would use these types depending on the number of
bits of the field, meaning that a caller would have to validate the
value they want to write if it does not implement e.g.
`Into<bound_u8<2>>`.

A bit radical maybe, but correcness ensues. :)