lender 🙂

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Lending Iterator; a niche, yet seemingly pervasive, antipattern[^1]. This crate provides one such implementation, 'utilizing' #84533 and #25860.

Ok, maybe 'antipattern' is a little tough, but let's spare the antagonizing examples, if you can avoid using lending iterators, you probably should. You should heed the counsel of Polonious: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be".

Forewarning, before you go on with this crate, you should consider using a more seasoned 'lending iterator' crate, like the [lending-iterator] or [streaming-iterator] crates. Also, if a dyn Lender trait object is in your future, this crate definitely isn't going to work. This crate was not made to be used in any sort of production code, so please, use at your own risk (Documentation be damned!).

Nevertheless, to begin, I present to you WindowsMut.

```rust use ::lender::prelude::*;

struct WindowsMut<'a, T> { slice: &'a mut [T], begin: usize, len: usize, } impl<'lend, 'a, T> Lending<'lend> for WindowsMut<'a, T> { type Lend = &'lend mut [T]; } impl<'a, T> Lender for WindowsMut<'a, T> { fn next<'lend>(&'lend mut self) -> Option<&'lend mut [T]> { let begin = self.begin; self.begin = self.begin.saturatingadd(1); self.slice.getmut(begin..begin + self.len) } } // Fibonacci sequence let mut data = vec![0u32; 3 * 3]; data[1] = 1; WindowsMut { slice: &mut data, begin: 0, len: 3 } .foreach(hrcmut!(for<'lend> |w: &'lend mut [u32]| { w[2] = w[0] + w[1] })); assert_eq!(data, [0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21]); ```

As all great standard examples are, a WindowsMut just for a Fibonacci sequence is actually a great example of what you shouldn't use lending iterators for. Libraries can just provide Index and IndexMut on their collections and it's a lot of boilerplate for something a simple for loop can do.

rust let mut data = vec![0; 3 * 3]; data[1] = 1; for i in 2..data.len() { data[i] = data[i - 1] + data[i - 2]; } assert_eq!(data, [0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21]);

So, let's look at a slightly more interesting example, LinesStr, an io::Lines with an Item of &str instead of String. It's a good example of borrowing from the iterator itself.

```rust use std::io; use ::lender::prelude::*;

struct LinesStr { buf: B, line: String, } impl<'lend, B: io::BufRead> Lending<'lend> for LinesStr { type Lend = io::Result<&'lend str>; } impl Lender for LinesStr { fn next<'lend>(&'lend mut self) -> Option> { self.line.clear(); match self.buf.readline(&mut self.line) { Err(e) => return Some(Err(e)), Ok(0) => return None, Ok(nread) => (), }; if self.line.endswith('\n') { self.line.pop(); if self.line.endswith('\r') { self.line.pop(); } } Some(Ok(&self.line)) } }

let buf = io::BufReader::withcapacity(10, "Hello\nWorld\n".asbytes()); let mut lines = LinesStr { buf, line: String::new() }; asserteq!(lines.next().unwrap().unwrap(), "Hello"); asserteq!(lines.next().unwrap().unwrap(), "World"); ```

For most cases like this, you could just probably rely on the optimizer, i.e. reusing the same buffer instead of allocating a new one each time, but you see where we're going with this.

Turn a lender into an iterator with cloned() where lend is Clone, copied() where lend is Copy, owned() where lend is ToOwned, or iter() where lend already satisfies the restrictions of Iterator::Item.

partition_in_place and array_chunks are unsupported. Instead of array_chunks, we have chunky, to make lenders nice and chunky 🙂.

Resources

Please thank and check out the great resources below that helped me and many others learn about Rust and the lending iterator problem.

  • Sabrina Jewson's Blog for their awesome blog post on why lifetime GATs are not (yet) the solution to this problem, I highly recommend reading it.
  • The awesome people on the Rust Users Forum in helping me understand the borrow checker and HRTBs better and being patient with me and other aspiring rustaceans as we try to learn more about Rust.
  • Daniel Henry-Mantilla for writing [lending-iterator] and many other great crates and sharing their great work.
  • Everyone who's contributed to Rust for making such a great language and iterator library.

Unsafe & Transmutes Beware!!!

Many patterns in lending iterators require polonius-emulating unsafe code, but please, if you see any unsafe code that can be made safe, please let me know! I am still learning Rust and I'm sure I've made many mistakes.

License

Licensed under either the MIT or Apache-2.0 license.