Advice on how to expose hashmap via C ABI and LLVM

help
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Hi, this is a slightly off-topic and design-oriented question, but I am doing this in rust and i think this community probably has good advice.

I'm currently working on my own programming language. It is compiled to LLVM IR, and borrows some functionality in rust exposed via extern C functions.

I'm introducing some form of generics in my language, specifically a HashMap. In an ideal world, I would like to not write a hashmap implementation myself, and would rather expose Rust's HashMap implementation to the language.

I can't think of a way to make this happen. I understand that I can expose even generic functions via the C ABI to some extent, but I believe I would need some way to force rust to generate a generic variant for every Key, Value type of the hashmap, as well as name them something unique that I can refer to in the LLVM IR.

If I understand correctly, generics in rust involve building a function per parameter combination. E.G. in the case of HashMaps, there is a copy of the Rust stdlib, and that is used to construct the specialized versions.

In order to replicate that for my language, it seems like I would have to implement generics in my own language, then author my own version of a HashMap so that my compiler can generate specialized versions per parameter combination.

Is there any way to accomplish using rust's Hashmap implementation here?

Thanks for any help.

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You can use C/Java style "generics". Write on Rust C API like:


#[no_mange]
extern "C" fn hashmap_new(hash_fn: extern "C" fn(*const c_void)->u32) -> *c_void;
#[no_mange]
extern "C" fn create_hashmap(hashmap: *c_void, key: *const c_void) -> *c_void;

I suppose idea is clear, key and data is pointer to c_void, and user should provide hash function.
Just like qsort from libc or how Java works with generics under the hood (all is Object).

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