Selfref 0.4: It's about back-references, now with closures! [no_std, no_alloc]

This has been released for a while but we never made a proper announcement for it, so:

Selfref

Selfref is a stable (rust 1.65.0+) no-std and no-alloc crate for self-referential and back-referential structs. What's a back-referential struct? Well, sometimes, in C, you have something like this:

struct server;

struct context {
  struct server *server;
}

struct server {
  struct context **contexts;
}

And the invariant is that the context always has a pointer back to the server that owns it. This is useful because it allows passing the context (by pointer) and getting access to the server and whatnot.

Well, selfref supports this! In fact it's the primary use-case! In fact other crates tend not to support this! You can see a full example in the docs: selfref - Rust

Selfref 0.4 is likely the last update selfref is gonna need for a long time. The only reason it's not 1.0 yet is because it relies on not-quite-fleshed-out language implementation details, which could break in a future Rust version. However, these details would not affect selfref's public API, so just keep an eye on rustsec for any advisories about needing to up the point release. Further, once these details are finalized, all selfref versions/branches will be updated for it - from 0.1 to 0.4 - and 1.0 will be released.

Changelog (full)

Selfref 0.4.x

Use closures for new_with

Selfref 0.3.x

Use closures for operate_in

Selfref 0.2.x

Support ?Sized

Selfref 0.2.2

Support stable Rust

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