Niko Matsakis, Paul Faria and I have been working on Non Lexical Lifetimes (NLL) during the impl period. The work has landed on master and you can use it right now by installing Rust nightly.

If you don’t know what Non Lexical Lifetimes are, you should read the RFC first. The idea of this post is to show how to use NLL right now. It’s not my intention to cover the theory behind it or how it solves all the problems it solves, that’s already explained out there. So, if you want to know more about lifetimes and non lexical lifetimes, I recommend you to read the RFC and investigate pull requests. Maybe this search is useful https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pulls?utf8=✓&q=nll+is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed.

So let’s try non lexical lifetimes out with some examples. First of all you need to install nightly if you don’t have it. Go ahead and run rustup install nightly .

Let’s take a look at a first contrived example that does not compile, using current lexical lifetimes, which are scope based.

#![allow(unused_variables)] fn main () { let mut x = 22 ; let p = & mut x ; // mutable borrow println ! ( "{}" , x ); // later used }

Run

This does not compile because x is mutably borrowed and later used within the same scope.

error[E0502]: cannot borrow `x` as immutable because it is also borrowed as mutable --> src/main.rs:8:20 | 6 | let p = &mut x; // mutable borrow | - mutable borrow occurs here 7 | 8 | println!("{}", x); // later used | ^ immutable borrow occurs here 9 | } | - mutable borrow ends here error: aborting due to previous error

Now, same example but enabling NLL. To enable it you just need to use the NLL feature gate in your crate #![feature(nll)] .

#![feature(nll)] #![allow(unused_variables)] fn main () { let mut x = 22 ; let p = & mut x ; println ! ( "{}" , x ); }

Run

This compiles perfectly fine because the compiler knows that the mutable borrow of x do not expand until the end of the scope. It just finishes before using x again, so there’s no conflict there.

Now, a more complex example …

use std :: collections :: HashMap ; fn get_default ( map : & mut HashMap , key : usize ) -> & mut String { match map . get_mut ( & key ) { Some ( value ) => value , None => { map . insert ( key , "" . to_string ()); map . get_mut ( & key ). unwrap () } } } fn main () { let map = & mut HashMap :: new (); map . insert ( 22 , format ! ( "Hello, world" )); map . insert ( 44 , format ! ( "Goodbye, world" )); assert_eq ! ( &* get_default ( map , 22 ), "Hello, world" ); assert_eq ! ( &* get_default ( map , 66 ), "" ); }

Run

This example, using the current scoped based lifetime system, doesn’t compile. That’s because get_mut borrows map from the match until the end of the scope. That covers the None arm in which we have a mutable borrow, and that’a not allowed by the compiler.

Here is the compiler error …

error[E0499]: cannot borrow `*map` as mutable more than once at a time --> src/main.rs:7:13 | 4 | match map.get_mut(&key) { | --- first mutable borrow occurs here ... 7 | map.insert(key, "".to_string()); | ^^^ second mutable borrow occurs here ... 11 | } | - first borrow ends here error[E0499]: cannot borrow `*map` as mutable more than once at a time --> src/main.rs:8:13 | 4 | match map.get_mut(&key) { | --- first mutable borrow occurs here ... 8 | map.get_mut(&key).unwrap() | ^^^ second mutable borrow occurs here ... 11 | } | - first borrow ends here error: aborting due to 2 previous errors

In order to make this example compile we need some contortions, like …

fn get_default ( map : & mut HashMap , key : usize ) -> & mut String { match map . get_mut ( & key ) { Some ( value ) => return value , None => { } } map . insert ( key , "" . to_string ()); map . get_mut ( & key ). unwrap () }

While this now works, is a bit unfortunate that we need to use this artificial constructions.

If you now enable NLL by adding #![feature(nll)] to the original example …

#![feature(nll)] use std :: collections :: HashMap ; fn get_default ( map : & mut HashMap , key : usize ) -> & mut String { match map . get_mut ( & key ) { Some ( value ) => value , None => { map . insert ( key , "" . to_string ()); map . get_mut ( & key ). unwrap () } } } fn main () { let map = & mut HashMap :: new (); map . insert ( 22 , format ! ( "Hello, world" )); map . insert ( 44 , format ! ( "Goodbye, world" )); assert_eq ! ( &* get_default ( map , 22 ), "Hello, world" ); assert_eq ! ( &* get_default ( map , 66 ), "" ); }

Run

Then it perfectly compiles and we don’t have to do the contortions anymore.

Another interesting thing I’ve helped with is a new way to display borrowing errors called three point error. For now, you need to explicitly enable that by using -Znll-dump-cause .

So, given the following example with borrowing errors in NLL mode …

#![feature(nll)] #![allow(unused_assignments)] fn main () { let mut x = 22 ; let p = & x ; x = 33 ; println ! ( "{}" , p ); }

Run (unfortunately you can’t pass -Znll-dump-cause in Playpen).

if you try to compile it with nll-dump-cause flag enabled, you will get three point errors which look like …

$ rustc -Znll-dump-cause main.rs error[E0506]: cannot assign to `x` because it is borrowed --> src/main.rs:9:5 | 7 | let p = &x; | -- borrow of `x` occurs here 8 | 9 | x = 33; | ^^^^^^ assignment to borrowed `x` occurs here 10 | 11 | println!("{}", p); | - borrow later used here error: aborting due to previous error

As you can see it shows where the borrow occurs, where the assignment to the borrow occurs and where the borrow is later used, which gives you a very good idea of what the error is about.

There are still some performance issues with this option ( nll-dump-cause ) so far. The idea is that this thing is going to be enabled by default once we are able to fix the performance problems related with it. I will be working on this with the help of Niko, so stay tuned :).

I’m very excited about NLL as I hope you are. Try to go ahead and test your code using NLL and report the errors you find. There are already some issues to fix but things are slowly shaping up.

Lastly, as a bonus paragraph, I’d like to describe a bit my experience working on this project during the impl period. First of all, I can’t believe I had the chance to learn directly from Niko, despite being my first Rust project. Niko is an admirable professional but more importantly he is super nice and very accessible. We spent a lot of time chatting on Gitter, having calls and then 3 days working during Rust Belt Rust. I also spent some time pairing and sharing thoughts with other developers, specially with Paul, was a very helpful to have him around. Well, a paragraph is not enough to describe how grateful I am but I’m more than happy to share more thoughts if someone is interested. In that case, just ping me.

See also