typeerasedvec

This crate provides a single struct [TypeErasedVec], which (as its name says) is a type erased [Vec].

When you know what its type is, you can get a slice or [Vec] back using [TypeErasedVec::get] or [TypeErasedVec::get_mut].

Motivation

When communicating with a world outside Rust (GPU for example), it often wants a raw buffer and some kind of type descriptor.

There were two options for expressing this in Rust:

• Vec<u8> + type descriptor.
• Vec<T>.

The first option is not attractive because Vec<u8> cannot be safely used as Vec<T>, hence we lose the ability of modifying the buffer.

The second option makes all types holding that buffer generic over T, which is not feasible when T must be determined at runtime. For example, buffers can be loaded from a 3D model file on disk, where the file contains type information to be passed to the 3D renderer.

Example

```rust use typeerasedvec::TypeErasedVec;

let mut vec = TypeErasedVec::new::();

let mut vecmut = unsafe { vec.getmut() }; for i in 0..10 { vec_mut.push(i); }

asserteq!(*vecmut, (0..10).collect::>()); ```