alt Hacker NewsThe Algebra of Loans in Rust
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Some things I occasionally contemplate: (not that I’ve ever tried to work any of these out anywhere near completely)
1. Why isn’t there a variant of &mut that doesn’t allow swapping the value? I feel like it ought to be possible to lend out permission to mutate some object but not to replace it. Pinning the object works, but that’s rather extreme.
2. Would it be safe to lend the reference type above to a pinned object? After all, if a function promises to return with the passed-in parameter intact in its original location and not to swap it with a different value/place, then its address must stay intact.
3. Why is pinning a weird sticky property of a reference? Shouldn’t non-movability of an object be a property of the object’s type? Is it just a historical artifact that it works the way it does or is this behavior actually desirable?
4. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a reference type that gave no permissions at all but still guaranteed that the referred-to object would continue to exist? It might make more sense to use with RefCell-like objects than plain &. This new reference type could exist concurrently with &mut.
What does this sort of language complexity mean for future changes in Rust? In C++, its existing complexity makes new changes so much more difficult. Is Rust reaching a similar place?
Am i mistaken or is there an error in the writing?
> For example, if I have a &own T I can reborrow it into a &mut T but not a &pin own T.
From the table can't you do both? Maybe they mean "not a &pin mut T" ?
I was thinking this is some accounting primer in Rust...dang, still good stuff to know.
I have what I thought was a broad knowledge base of rust an experience in it over many domains, but I haven't heard of most of those. Have been getting by with `&`, and `&mut` only from those tables!
Incidentally, I think this is one of Rust's best features, and I sorely miss it in Python, JS and other languages. They keep me guessing whether a function will mutate the parent structure, or a local copy in those languages!
Incidentally, I recently posted in another thread here how I just discovered the 'named loop/scope feature, and how I thought it was great, but took a while to discover. A reply was along the effect of "That's not new; it's a common feature". Maybe I don't really know rust, but a dialect of it...