WARNING: This crate is NO LONGER MAINTAINED OR SUPPORTED

I'm not going to yank the crate because it's still fit for its intended purpose, but as time goes on it will become increasingly out of step with Rust's evolution, so users are encouraged to explore other solutions. I will also not merge any pull requests, as the code is sufficiently complicated that I'm no longer confident in my ability to effectively review them. Rental can be considered "frozen" in its current state, and any further development will need to take place under a fork for whoever wishes to do so.

Rental - A macro to generate safe self-referential structs, plus premade types for common use cases.

Documentation

Overview

It can sometimes occur in the course of designing an API that it would be convenient, or even necessary, to allow fields within a struct to hold references to other fields within that same struct. Rust's concept of ownership and borrowing is powerful, but can't express such a scenario yet.

Creating such a struct manually would require unsafe code to erase lifetime parameters from the field types. Accessing the fields directly would be completely unsafe as a result. This library addresses that issue by allowing access to the internal fields only under carefully controlled circumstances, through closures that are bounded by generic lifetimes to prevent infiltration or exfiltration of any data with an incorrect lifetime. In short, while the struct internally uses unsafe code to store the fields, the interface exposed to the consumer of the struct is completely safe. The implementation of this interface is subtle and verbose, hence the macro to automate the process.

The API of this crate consists of the rental macro that generates safe self-referential structs, a few example instantiations to demonstrate the API provided by such structs (see examples), and a module of premade instantiations to cover common use cases (see common).

Example

One instance where this crate is useful is when working with libloading. That crate provides a Library struct that defines methods to borrow Symbols from it. These symbols are bounded by the lifetime of the library, and are thus considered a borrow. Under normal circumstances, one would be unable to store both the library and the symbols within a single struct, but the macro defined in this crate allows you to define a struct that is capable of storing both simultaneously, like so:

rental! {
    pub mod rent_libloading {
        use libloading;

        #[rental(deref_suffix)] // This struct will deref to the Deref::Target of Symbol.
        pub struct RentSymbol<S: 'static> {
            lib: Box<libloading::Library>, // Library is boxed for StableDeref.
            sym: libloading::Symbol<'lib, S>, // The 'lib lifetime borrows lib.
        }
    }
}

fn main() {
    let lib = libloading::Library::new("my_lib.so").unwrap(); // Open our dylib.
    if let Ok(rs) = rent_libloading::RentSymbol::try_new(
        Box::new(lib),
        |lib| unsafe { lib.get::<extern "C" fn()>(b"my_symbol") }) // Loading symbols is unsafe.
    {
        (*rs)(); // Call our function
    };
}

In this way we can store both the Library and the Symbol that borrows it in a single struct. We can even tell our struct to deref to the function pointer itself so we can easily call it. This is legal because the function pointer does not contain any of the special lifetimes introduced by the rental struct in its type signature, which means reborrowing will not expose them to the outside world. As an aside, the unsafe block for loading the symbol is necessary because the act of loading a symbol from a dylib is unsafe, and is unrelated to rental.

Limitations

There are a few limitations with the current implementation due to bugs or pending features in rust itself. These will be lifted once the underlying language allows it.

• Currently, the rental struct itself can only take lifetime parameters under certain conditions. These conditions are difficult to fully describe, but in general, a lifetime param of the rental struct itself must appear "outside" of any special rental lifetimes in the type signatures of the struct fields. To put it another way, replacing the rental lifetimes with 'static must still produce legal types, otherwise it will not compile. In most situations this is fine, since most of the use cases for this library involve erasing all of the lifetimes anyway, but there's no reason why the head element of a rental struct shouldn't be able to take arbitrary lifetime params. This is currently impossible to fully support due to lack of an 'unsafe lifetime or equivalent feature.
• Prefix fields, and the head field if it IS a subrental, must be of the form Foo<T> where Foo is some StableDeref container, or rental will not be able to correctly guess the Deref::Target of the type. If you are using a custom type that does not fit this pattern, you can use the target_ty attribute on the field to manually specify the target type. If the head field is NOT a subrental, then it may have any form as long as it is StableDeref.
• Rental structs can only have a maximum of 32 rental lifetimes, including transitive rental lifetimes from subrentals. This limitation is the result of needing to implement a new trait for each rental arity. This limit can be easily increased if necessary.
• The references received in the constructor closures don't currently have their lifetime relationship to eachother expressed in bounds, since HRTB lifetimes do not currently support bounds. This is not a soundness hole, but it does prevent some otherwise valid uses from compiling.