Relationship to shared_memory?

[asajeffrey]

There's another crate with similar goals to this one, which is https://github.com/elast0ny/shared_memory-rs/ which https://github.com/asajeffrey/shared-data/ builds on. I wonder if there's a connection, and whether shared_memory's support for other architectures can be used?

[asajeffrey]

cc @elast0ny

[Ekleog]

As far as I understand shared_memory-rs, its SharedMem appears to be doing much more than our Shared does, with all the locking.

OTOH, its SharedMemRaw appears to be more unsafe than our Shared, due to its not requiring ProcSync.

Overall, I think the big difference between shared_memory-rs and shmem is that shmem attempts to be as thin a wrapper around mmap as possible (while being safe thanks to requiring ProcSync -- being a thin wrapper also means exposing functions like from_raw_fd etc.), while shared_memory provides both a completely-unsafe and a locked version of shared memory.

Oh, and the last difference is that our Shared stores directly an object type, while SharedMem appears to provide interface only to a batch of memory.

Now, I say that based only on a quick skim of shared_memory-rs, maybe I'm mistaken about it?

[asajeffrey]

That seems accurate. The shared_memory crate is about getting a *mut u8 pointing into shared memory, safely accessing it is another matter.

[Ekleog]

(closing, as the question appears to have been answered)