What's the difference between PhantomData and the empty array?

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What's the difference between PhantomData<T> and [T; 0]?

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  • Technical aspect:
    [T; 0] currently requires T : Sized, and [T; 0] has the alignment of T (whereas PhantomData always has an alignment of 1).

    • PhantomData<T> also unconditionally is Copy + Debug + Ord + Hash

    A tiny bonus for zero-long arrays is that they require no import or long name, and that instantiating one is very easy: [].

  • Documentation aspect:
    PhantomData may be a bit better at conveying that the stuff in question is "phantom", whereas an empty array, historically, is more often used for field/struct alignement shenanigans.

  • My own rule of thumb:
    I personally reach for PhantomData when inside data types, and for [; 0] when using it for function arguments, especially user-provided closure arguments when tinkering with higher-order signatures or whatnot (since the non-1-alignment of a zero-sized parameter should play no role whatsoever in the machine code generated around function calls)

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hah, funny you bring that up because that kind of stuff is exactly why we're playing with this XD (tho we can't seem to get it to work ourselves)

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It does for the C abi on x86_64-pc-windows-gnu and {s390x,sparc64,powerpc}-unknown-linux-{gnu,musl,uclibc} I think. For some reason those platforms decided to not ignore zero sized arguments in their calling convention, so I think it will take up the amount of space a 1 byte sized type with the same alignment would.

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Oh no :cold_sweat:

  • Well, I'm still gonna assume or at least hope this doesn't happen for extern "Rust" / "rust-call"-expanded closures :pray:
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Indeed. For rust abi's ZST's are always ignored. In fact rustc itself depends on signatures of form extern "rust-call" fn(ZstType, (Arg1, Arg2)) to be abi compatible with those of from extern "Rust" fn(Arg1, Arg2). This allows it to cast from a closure that doesn't capture anything to a function pointer without needing a shim.

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