After a period of dormancy, I’m pleased to announce that the new version of rental is available! This work was largely inspired by all the discussion surrounding the Pin proposal. While I didn’t end up using Pin , it really made me think about what capabilities I wanted rental to have and how to achieve them best.

At any rate, this version is much less of a departure from 0.4 than that was from 0.3. The API is mostly the same with a few method renames and attribute adjustments, so updating code should be relatively straightforward. Under the hood there has been substantial rework to upgrade to syn 0.13 in preparation for the new macros infrastructure. This should hopefully greatly improve the error messages once all the parts are in place, but that’s still to come.

What really makes this version stand out though are 2 new features whose absence was always a point of frustration for me. In the past, it was only possible to access fields via awkward closures, which was particularly irritating if you wanted to borrow something out of the rental struct. While I can’t eliminate that for all cases, there are a huge number of cases where we can do better. The first major new feature is full support for covariant structs.

If the types in your rental struct are covariant over their lifetime parameters, which most will be, then this will allow you to directly borrow the field out of the struct, and the lifetimes will be reborrowed to match the &self param. This opens the gate pretty far and substantially improves ergonomics for many uses. As an example:

#[macro_use] extern crate rental; rental! { pub mod covariant { use std::collections::HashMap; #[rental(covariant)] pub struct RentHashMap { head: String, // Store a bunch of slices of our string, or whatever map: HashMap<usize, &'head str>, } } } fn test_covariant() { use std::collections::HashMap; // Create our rental struct. I don't bother to put anything in the hash map // for this example, but you can add whatever you want. let rent_hash = covariant::RentHashMap::new("Hello, World!".to_string(), |_| HashMap::new()); // _Directly_ borrow the hashmap out of the rental struct. No closures! let hash_ref = rent_hash.suffix(); // Do whatever with our borrow println!("{}", hash_ref.contains_key(&12)); }

With even just the little experimentation I’ve done with this so far, it feels SO much better to be able to do this now. Not to oversell it though, you can NOT mutably borrow fields directly under any circumstances, as that is fundamentally unsound because of lifetime invariance for mutable refs. So to update our hashmap we’d need to use a closure, but after it’s updated we can directly borrow it again as we please.

Next up, one feature that some smart reference types such as Ref have is the ability to map its contents to another type, as long as it’s bounded by the same lifetime. Rental did not support the ability to do this… until now!

#[macro_use] extern crate rental; pub struct Foo { i: i32, } rental! { mod rentals { use super::*; #[rental(map_suffix = "T")] pub struct SimpleRef<T: 'static> { foo: Box<Foo>, fr: &'foo T, } } } fn map() { let foo = Foo { i: 5 }; let sr = rentals::SimpleRef::new(Box::new(foo), |foo| foo); // Remap our rental struct to a direct reference to the i32 inside let sr = sr.map(|fr| &fr.i); assert_eq!(sr.rent(|ir| **ir), 5); }

Here we add the map_suffix = "T" option, which marks T as the mappable type param. We can now call map on our rental struct to convert the reference from one type into another. This should eliminate the need to create needless subrentals just to change the type of your suffix field.

With these new capabilities in place, it is now possible to create a struct that is essentially equivalent to an OwningRef using rental. In fact, the new common module contains a collection of premade types with such functionality. The main capability owning-ref still has that rental does not is the ability to erase the type of the head. This would be possible to implement in rental, but I’m not entirely sold on it. Type erasure wasn’t ever really a goal of rental, so I feel like that’s a little out of scope, but if there is demand for it I’m open to reconsidering.

That about covers the highlights. I hope people out there find this useful. I think this is about the farthest library support for self-referential types can go in rust without explicit language support, so we’ll see what the future brings.