Best way to read a string from a struct field written to through shared memory

General Usage
,
1

Hello,

I have an embedded Julia setup where there’s a struct holding vectors of other structs allocated in Julia. The parent struct is stored in a global Ref and the pointers to data fields of the parent struct’s vector-typed fields are written to from outside of Julia. It works great for primitive value types but I’ve had some trouble with passing through strings (fixed max size, ASCII-only). Is the solution below the best I can do on Julia 0.6?

struct Value
    str :: SVector{10, UInt8}
end

struct Parent
   values :: Vector{Value}
end

global const STATE = Ref{Parent}()

function parse_ascii(vec :: A) where {A <: AbstractArray{UInt8, 1}}
    res = Vector{UInt8}()
    for i in eachindex(vec)
        if vec[i] == 0
            break
        end
        push!(res, vec[i])
    end
    String(res)
end

// called after the memory has been written to
function process()
    println(parse_ascii(STATE[].values[1].str))
end

I’m wondering if there’s a way to obtain a stable pointer to the STATE[].values[1].str and e.g. wrap it into a WeakRefString - couldn’t find a way to do this.