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0380-stabilize-std-fmt.md

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Summary

Stabilize the std::fmt module, in addition to the related macros and formatting language syntax. As a high-level summary:

  • Leave the format syntax as-is.
  • Remove a number of superfluous formatting traits (renaming a few in the process).

Motivation

This RFC is primarily motivated by the need to stabilize std::fmt. In the past stabilization has not required RFCs, but the changes envisioned for this module are far-reaching and modify some parts of the language (format syntax), leading to the conclusion that this stabilization effort required an RFC.

Detailed design

The std::fmt module encompasses more than just the actual structs/traits/functions/etc defined within it, but also a number of macros and the formatting language syntax for describing format strings. Each of these features of the module will be described in turn.

Formatting Language Syntax

The documented syntax will not be changing as-written. All of these features will be accepted wholesale (considered stable):

  • Usage of {} for "format something here" placeholders
  • {{ as an escape for { (and vice-versa for })
  • Various format specifiers
    • fill character for alignment
    • actual alignment, left (<), center (^), and right (>).
    • sign to print (+ or -)
    • minimum width for text to be printed
      • both a literal count and a runtime argument to the format string
    • precision or maximum width
      • all of a literal count, a specific runtime argument to the format string, and "the next" runtime argument to the format string.
    • "alternate formatting" (#)
    • leading zeroes (0)
  • Integer specifiers of what to format ({0})
  • Named arguments ({foo})

Using Format Specifiers

While quite useful occasionally, there is no static guarantee that any implementation of a formatting trait actually respects the format specifiers passed in. For example, this code does not necessarily work as expected:

#[deriving(Show)]
struct A;

format!("{:10}", A);

All of the primitives for rust (strings, integers, etc) have implementations of Show which respect these formatting flags, but almost no other implementations do (notably those generated via deriving).

This RFC proposes stabilizing the formatting flags, despite this current state of affairs. There are in theory possible alternatives in which there is a static guarantee that a type does indeed respect format specifiers when one is provided, generating a compile-time error when a type doesn't respect a specifier. These alternatives, however, appear to be too heavyweight and are considered somewhat overkill.

In general it's trivial to respect format specifiers if an implementation delegates to a primitive or somehow has a buffer of what's to be formatted. To cover these two use cases, the Formatter structure passed around has helper methods to assist in formatting these situations. This is, however, quite rare to fall into one of these two buckets, so the specifiers are largely ignored (and the formatter is write!-n to directly).

Named Arguments

Currently Rust does not support named arguments anywhere except for format strings. Format strings can get away with it because they're all part of a macro invocation (unlike the rest of Rust syntax).

The worry for stabilizing a named argument syntax for the formatting language is that if Rust ever adopts named arguments with a different syntax, it would be quite odd having two systems.

The most recently proposed keyword argument RFC used : for the invocation syntax rather than = as formatting does today. Additionally, today foo = bar is a valid expression, having a value of type ().

With these worries, there are one of two routes that could be pursued:

  1. The expr = expr syntax could be disallowed on the language level. This could happen both in a total fashion or just allowing the expression appearing as a function argument. For both cases, this will probably be considered a "wart" of Rust's grammar.
  2. The foo = bar syntax could be allowed in the macro with prior knowledge that the default argument syntax for Rust, if one is ever developed, will likely be different. This would mean that the foo = bar syntax in formatting macros will likely be considered a wart in the future.

Given these two cases, the clear choice seems to be accepting a wart in the formatting macros themselves. It will likely be possible to extend the macro in the future to support whatever named argument syntax is developed as well, and the old syntax could be accepted for some time.

Formatting Traits

Today there are 16 formatting traits. Each trait represents a "type" of formatting, corresponding to the [type] production in the formatting syntax. As a bit of history, the original intent was for each trait to declare what specifier it used, allowing users to add more specifiers in newer crates. For example the time crate could provide the {:time} formatting trait. This design was seen as too complicated, however, so it was not landed. It does, however, partly motivate why there is one trait per format specifier today.

The 16 formatting traits and their format specifiers are:

  • nothing ⇒ Show
  • d ⇒ Signed
  • i ⇒ Signed
  • u ⇒ Unsigned
  • b ⇒ Bool
  • c ⇒ Char
  • o ⇒ Octal
  • x ⇒ LowerHex
  • X ⇒ UpperHex
  • s ⇒ String
  • p ⇒ Pointer
  • t ⇒ Binary
  • f ⇒ Float
  • e ⇒ LowerExp
  • E ⇒ UpperExp
  • ? ⇒ Poly

This RFC proposes removing the following traits:

  • Signed
  • Unsigned
  • Bool
  • Char
  • String
  • Float

Note that this RFC would like to remove Poly, but that is covered by a separate RFC.

Today by far the most common formatting trait is Show, and over time the usefulness of these formatting traits has been reduced. The traits this RFC proposes to remove are only assertions that the type provided actually implements the trait, there are few known implementations of the traits which diverge on how they are implemented.

Additionally, there are a two of oddities inherited from ancient C:

  • Both d and i are wired to Signed
  • One may reasonable expect the Binary trait to use b as its specifier.

The remaining traits this RFC recommends leaving. The rationale for this is that they represent alternate representations of primitive types in general, and are also quite often expected when coming from other format syntaxes such as C/Python/Ruby/etc.

It would, of course, be possible to re-add any of these traits in a backwards-compatible fashion.

Format type for Binary

With the removal of the Bool trait, this RFC recommends renaming the specifier for Binary to b instead of t.

Combining all traits

A possible alternative to having many traits is to instead have one trait, such as:

pub trait Show {
    fn fmt(...);
    fn hex(...) { fmt(...) }
    fn lower_hex(...) { fmt(...) }
    ...
}

There are a number of pros to this design:

  • Instead of having to consider many traits, only one trait needs to be considered.
  • All types automatically implement all format types or zero format types.
  • In a hypothetical world where a format string could be constructed at runtime, this would alleviate the signature of such a function. The concrete type taken for all its arguments would be &Show and then if the format string supplied :x or :o the runtime would simply delegate to the relevant trait method.

There are also a number of cons to this design, which motivate this RFC recommending the remaining separation of these traits.

  • The "static assertion" that a type implements a relevant format trait becomes almost nonexistent because all types either implement none or all formatting traits.
  • The documentation for the Show trait becomes somewhat overwhelming because it's no longer immediately clear which method should be overridden for what.
  • A hypothetical world with runtime format string construction could find a different system for taking arguments.

Method signature

Currently, each formatting trait has a signature as follows:

fn fmt(&self, f: &mut fmt::Formatter) -> fmt::Result;

This implies that all formatting is considered to be a stream-oriented operation where f is a sink to write bytes to. The fmt::Result type indicates that some form of "write error" happened, but conveys no extra information.

This API has a number of oddities:

  • The type Formatter has inherent write and write_fmt methods to be used in conjunction with the write! macro return an instance of fmt::Result.
  • The Formatter type also implements the std::io::Writer trait in order to be able to pass around a &mut Writer.
  • This relies on the duck-typing of macros and for the inherent write_fmt method to trump the Writer's write_fmt method in order to return an error of the correct type.
  • The Result return type is an enumeration with precisely one variant, FormatError.

Overall, this signature seems to be appropriate in terms of "give me a sink of bytes to write myself to, and let me return an error if one happens". Due to this, this RFC recommends that all formatting traits be marked #[unstable].

Macros

There are a number of prelude macros which interact with the format syntax:

  • format_args
  • format_args_method
  • write
  • writeln
  • print
  • println
  • format
  • fail
  • assert
  • debug_assert

All of these are macro_rules!-defined macros, except for format_args and format_args_method.

Common syntax

All of these macros take some form of prefix, while the trailing suffix is always some instantiation of the formatting syntax. The suffix portion is recommended to be considered #[stable], and the sections below will discuss each macro in detail with respect to its prefix and semantics.

format_args

The fundamental purpose of this macro is to generate a value of type &fmt::Arguments which represents a pending format computation. This structure can then be passed at some point to the methods in std::fmt to actually perform the format.

The prefix of this macro is some "callable thing", be it a top-level function or a closure. It cannot invoke a method because foo.bar is not a "callable thing" to call the bar method on foo.

Ideally, this macro would have no prefix, and would be callable like:

use std::fmt;

let args = format_args!("Hello {}!", "world");
let hello_world = fmt::format(args);

Unfortunately, without an implementation of RFC 31 this is not possible. As a result, this RFC proposes a #[stable] consideration of this macro and its syntax.

format_args_method

The purpose of this macro is to solve the "call this method" case not covered with the format_args macro. This macro was introduced fairly late in the game to solve the problem that &*trait_object was not allowed. This is currently allowed, however (due to DST).

This RFC proposes immediately removing this macro. The primary user of this macro is write!, meaning that the following code, which compiles today, would need to be rewritten:

let mut output = std::io::stdout();
// note the lack of `&mut` in front
write!(output, "hello {}", "world");

The write! macro would be redefined as:

macro_rules! write(
    ($dst:expr, $($arg:tt)*) => ({
        let dst = &mut *$dst;
        format_args!(|args| { dst.write_fmt(args) }, $($arg)*)
    })
)

The purpose here is to borrow $dst outside of the closure to ensure that the closure doesn't borrow too many of its contents. Otherwise, code such as this would be disallowed

write!(&mut my_struct.writer, "{}", my_struct.some_other_field);

write/writeln

These two macros take the prefix of "some pointer to a writer" as an argument, and then format data into the write (returning whatever write_fmt returns). These macros were originally designed to require a &mut T as the first argument, but today, due to the usage of format_args_method, they can take any T which responds to write_fmt.

This RFC recommends marking these two macros #[stable] with the modification above (removing format_args_method). The ln suffix to writeln will be discussed shortly.

print/println

These two macros take no prefix, and semantically print to a task-local stdout stream. The purpose of a task-local stream is provide some form of buffering to make stdout printing at all performant.

This RFC recommends marking these two macros a #[stable].

The ln suffix

The name println is one of the few locations in Rust where a short C-like abbreviation is accepted rather than the more verbose, but clear, print_line (for example). Due to the overwhelming precedent of other languages (even Java uses println!), this is seen as an acceptable special case to the rule.

format

This macro takes no prefix and returns a String.

In ancient rust this macro was called its shorter name, fmt. Additionally, the name format is somewhat inconsistent with the module name of fmt. Despite this, this RFC recommends considering this macro #[stable] due to its delegation to the format method in the std::fmt module, similar to how the write! macro delegates to the fmt::write.

fail/assert/debug_assert

The format string portions of these macros are recommended to be considered as #[stable] as part of this RFC. The actual stability of the macros is not considered as part of this RFC.

Freestanding Functions

There are a number of freestanding functions to consider in the std::fmt module for stabilization.

  • fn format(args: &Arguments) -> String

    This RFC recommends #[experimental]. This method is largely an implementation detail of this module, and should instead be used via:

    let args: &fmt::Arguments = ...;
format!("{}", args)

  • fn write(output: &mut FormatWriter, args: &Arguments) -> Result

    This is somewhat surprising in that the argument to this function is not a Writer, but rather a FormatWriter. This is technically speaking due to the core/std separation and how this function is defined in core and Writer is defined in std.

    This RFC recommends marking this function #[experimental] as the write_fmt exists on Writer to perform the corresponding operation. Consequently we may wish to remove this function in favor of the write_fmt method on FormatWriter.

    Ideally this method would be removed from the public API as it is just an implementation detail of the write! macro.

  • fn radix<T>(x: T, base: u8) -> RadixFmt<T, Radix>

    This function is a bit of an odd-man-out in that it is a constructor, but does not follow the existing conventions of Type::new. The purpose of this function is to expose the ability to format a number for any radix. The default format specifiers :o, :x, and :t are essentially shorthands for this function, except that the format types have specialized implementations per radix instead of a generic implementation.

    This RFC proposes that this function be considered #[unstable] as its location and naming are a bit questionable, but the functionality is desired.

Miscellaneous items

  • trait FormatWriter

    This trait is currently the actual implementation strategy of formatting, and is defined specially in libcore. It is rarely used outside of libcore. It is recommended to be #[experimental].

    There are possibilities in moving Reader and Writer to libcore with the error type as an associated item, allowing the FormatWriter trait to be eliminated entirely. Due to this possibility, the trait will be experimental for now as alternative solutions are explored.

  • struct Argument, mod rt, fn argument, fn argumentstr, fn argumentuint, Arguments::with_placeholders, Arguments::new

    These are implementation details of the Arguments structure as well as the expansion of the format_args! macro. It's recommended to mark these as #[experimental] and #[doc(hidden)]. Ideally there would be some form of macro-based privacy hygiene which would allow these to be truly private, but it will likely be the case that these simply become stable and we must live with them forever.

  • struct Arguments

    This is a representation of a "pending format string" which can be used to safely execute a Formatter over it. This RFC recommends #[stable].

  • struct Formatter

    This instance is passed to all formatting trait methods and contains helper methods for respecting formatting flags. This RFC recommends #[unstable].

    This RFC also recommends deprecating all public fields in favor of accessor methods. This should help provide future extensibility as well as preventing unnecessary mutation in the future.

  • enum FormatError

    This enumeration only has one instance, WriteError. It is recommended to make this a struct instead and rename it to just Error. The purpose of this is to signal that an error has occurred as part of formatting, but it does not provide a generic method to transmit any other information other than "an error happened" to maintain the ergonomics of today's usage. It's strongly recommended that implementations of Show and friends are infallible and only generate an error if the underlying Formatter returns an error itself.

  • Radix/RadixFmt

    Like the radix function, this RFC recommends #[unstable] for both of these pieces of functionality.

Drawbacks

Today's macro system necessitates exporting many implementation details of the formatting system, which is unfortunate.

Alternatives

A number of alternatives were laid out in the detailed description for various aspects.

Unresolved questions

  • How feasible and/or important is it to construct a format string at runtime given the recommend stability levels in this RFC?