Tokio AsyncRead + AsyncWrite cannot borrow as mutable in Pin

[DevilToad]

Hi all,

I'm quite new to Rust and ownership and borrowing has been one of the hardest things to get my head around. I'm writing a proxy using tokio for async and I'm trying to use the AsyncRead and AsyncWrite traits so that I can use the same function for both a TcpStream and an SslStream.

I've been working on this on and off for several months so I can't remember exactly how I got to this point, but the below code is what I currently have, and the compiler complains that s cannot be borrowed as mutable (this line: let s = Pin::<&mut T>::new(&mut s);).

I'm guessing that this is either something to do with asynchronicity or with Pin, but if I remove the mut from all of the relevant declarations, it then complains that poll_read doesn't exist in s.

async fn handle_http_request<T: AsyncRead + AsyncWrite + Unpin>(mut socket: &T) -> Result<(), Error> {
    let mut request_string = String::new();
    let mut s = socket.clone();
    poll_fn(|cx| {
        let mut buf = [0; 1024];
        let mut buf = ReadBuf::new(&mut buf);
        loop {
            let s = Pin::<&mut T>::new(&mut s);
            s.poll_read(cx, &mut buf);
            if buf.filled().len() > 0 {
                request_string.push_str(std::str::from_utf8(buf.filled()).unwrap());
                buf.clear();
            } else {
                return Poll::Ready(());
            }
        }
    });
    // ... more code here...
}

Any support would be greatly appreciated. If you need any more information, let me know.

[thombles]

Did you mean to make T bound by + Clone? It looks like at the moment

    let mut s = socket.clone();

is merely cloning the shared reference you passed into the function.

[alice]

Your function takes an immutable reference to the socket, but the methods on the AsyncRead/AsyncWrite traits require mutable access. That's never going to work.

Try changing the type of socket to &mut T. Then you should be able to call Pin::new(socket).poll_read(...) without problems.

[DevilToad]

Unfortunately neither TcpStream nor SslStream implement clone.

[alice]

Why are you trying to clone it in the first place?

[DevilToad]

Thank you! That worked. I thought that by declaring mut socket: &T in the function signature that it would make it a mutable reference.

[alice]

Oh. That mut is not part of the type. It would just let you change which socket the reference points at - it doesn't make the reference itself mutable,

[DevilToad]

I'm not sure to be honest. There was probably some logical reason for that at some point but I've now removed it.

[rschoon]

I think you might find it easier to use AsyncWriteExt/AsyncReadExt. These are extension traits which add additional methods to types implementing AsyncWrite/AsyncRead, and you wouldn't have to call poll methods manually (and I think doing it in a loop is all wrong, you would have to return the result from poll_read instead).

For example, you should be able to do something like:

use tokio::io::AsyncReadExt;

async fn handle_http_request<T: AsyncRead + AsyncWrite + Unpin>(socket: &mut T) -> Result<(), Error> {
    let mut buf = [0; 1024];
    let n = socket.read(&mut buf[..]).await?;
    // ... call std::str::from_utf8 and push to request_string here ...
}

[alice]

@rschoon Oh, yeah, you are right. I didn't really read the part of the code where they used the poll_* methods. A loop like that is definitely wrong.

[DevilToad]

Thanks @rschoon, I've gotten so bogged down in my attempts to sort this out that I got lost in what I was doing. I've replaced the loopy bit with read_all from AsyncReadExt and it seems to be working correctly up to (and slightly beyond) that point. Thank you both for the help with this, it's really appreciated.