[blog post] Do we really need language support for self-references?

community
1

I just published a post on self-references in safe Rust. I hope it may interest you.

Should I have posted it on internal instead?

1 Like
2

It is a nice idea for some cases, but I think this wouldn't help when you are trying to store something like object::Object<'a> next to the data it borrows from. The closure would have to construct the Object every time which is somewhat expensive as it has to parse the input bytes.

3

What do you mean? The index can totally be a reference itself, and the object pointed by the self reference is also going to be a reference. What needs to be constructed every time?

4

object::File contains references to the input data slice. It is impossible to rewrite it to use numerical indices without having to pass the input data to every method.

struct OwningFile {
    data: Vec<u8>,
    parsed_file: object::File<'self>,
}

OwningFile {
     data: large_blob,
     parsed_file: object::File::parse(&self.data).unwrap(),
}
2 Likes
5

Now I get it. My solution works only when creating the reference is cheap (like when indexing into a Vec a HashMap or a Map), but not when it’s expensive (like parsing a file).

6

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. We invite you to open a new topic if you have further questions or comments.