Transmuting u8 buffer to struct in Rust

Question

I have a byte buffer of unknown size, and I want to create a local struct variable pointing to the memory of the beginning of the buffer. Following what I\'d do in C, I trie

Answer 1

I gave up on the transmute stuff. *mut (raw pointers) in Rust are pretty similar to C pointers, so this was easy:

#[repr(C, packed)] // necessary
#[derive(Debug, Copy, Clone)] // not necessary
struct MyStruct {
    foo: u16,
    bar: u8,
}

fn main() {
    let v: Vec = vec![1, 2, 3];
    let buffer = v.as_slice();
    let mut s_safe: Option<&MyStruct> = None;
    let c_buf = buffer.as_ptr();
    let s = c_buf as *mut MyStruct;
    unsafe {
        let ref s2 = *s;
        s_safe = Some(s2);
    }
    println!("here is the struct: {:?}", s_safe.unwrap());
}

The unsafe tag there is no joke, but the way I'm using this, I know my buffer is filled and take the proper precautions involving endianness later on.