Implement bitwise operations for Ipv4Addr

[canndrew]

It's natural and common to apply bitwise operations to IPv4 addresses. For instance if I have an IP address 192.168.1.23 and a netmask 255.255.255.0 I might want to calculate:

192.168.1.23 & 255.255.255.0 => 192.168.1.0

It's possible to do this by converting to u32 and back, but I shouldn't have to.

[SimonSapin]

I don’t think arbitrary bitwise operations make sense. (What does it mean to XOR two addresses?) Is there anything other than masking? Would a dedicated addr.mask(24) method be enough?

[ExpHP]

Would a dedicated addr.mask(24) method be enough?

Probably not unless there's an easy way to get that 24...

[SimonSapin]

Well, how would you get that 255.255.255.0?

[fstirlitz]

Configuration file whose format you don't control?

[WiSaGaN]

What about creating a concrete type for "255.255.255.0" like "SubnetMask", and define proper constructors to outlaw invalid ones.

In this way we can be sure that only meaningful mask operations are done on IP addresses, in which bitwise operations are more of an implementation detail?

[carneeki]

What about creating a concrete type for "255.255.255.0" like "SubnetMask", and define proper constructors to outlaw invalid ones.

In this way we can be sure that only meaningful mask operations are done on IP addresses, in which bitwise operations are more of an implementation detail?

For anyone still looking at this, the ipnet crate builds on the std::net::{IpAddr, Ipv4Addr, Ipv6Addr} types to create subnets. Implementing std::ops::{BitAnd, BitOr} for the Ipv4Addr and Ipv6Addr types looks to be on the todo list, but there are examples for iteration, dividing subnets and aggregating adjacent prefixes.

[WiSaGaN]

There is currently active pull request related: rust-lang/rust#113747, with related rust-lang/libs-team#235

[clarfonthey]

This should be probably closed, then, in favour of those.