Low* string manipulation

Warning

The C.String library is now fully deprecated.

You may freely use string literals in your program, of type Prims.string. This is a valid Low* usage and will not trigger a warning. These strings are compiled as C literals and as such are zero-terminated.

You may also use non-allocating functions that operate over strings, such as FStar.strlen, string_of_bool, polymorphic equality over strings = (compiles into strcmp), etc. -- note that these are not part of the "minimal" krmllib and you'll have to link in krmllib/dist/generic/libkrmllib.a.

All other functions, e.g. strcat, substring, string_of_int are non-Low* and will trigger Warning 15, because they perform unchecked allocations.

Printing strings

LowStar.Printf.printf is now the official way to print strings. It is entirely meta-programmed and will meta-evaluate to a series of monomorphic calls, e.g.

LowStar.Printf.printf "Contents of %xuL -- length: %uL" (l, b) l

will meta-evaluate to:

LowStar_Printf_print_string "Contents of ";
LowStar_Printf_print_buffer_u32(l, b);
LowStar_Printf_print_string " -- length: ";
LowStar_Printf_print_u32(l);

There are no plans to make a call to LowStar.Printf.printf compile to a call to C's printf.

LowStar.Printf.sprintf generates calls to strcat unless all of your arguments are constants, in which case the result will entirely meta-evaluate to a string constant. Use with care and watch out for Warning 15.

String as buffers

LowStar.Literal is experimental and needs an overhaul. The idea is to allow you to cast a string literal as an immutable buffer of uint8. The main issues are:

  • no integration with LowStar.ConstPointer, which LowStar.Literal predates

  • since F* imposes that string literals be valid utf8, this means that you can't use this as a way to input arbitrary data.

As such, the usefulness of LowStar.Literal is limited.