Rust without implicit copies

This post floats a variation of boats’ UnpinCell proposal that I’m calling MinPin.1 MinPin’s goal is to integrate Pin into the language in a “minimally disruptive” way2 – and in particular a way that is fully backwards compatible. Unlike Overwrite, MinPin does not attempt to make Pin and &mut “play nicely” together. It does however leave the door...

In July, boats presented a compelling vision in their post pinned places. With the Overwrite trait that I introduced in my previous post, however, I think we can get somewhere even more compelling, albeit at the cost of a tricky transition. As I will argue in this post, the Overwrite trait effectively becomes a better version of the existing...

What would you say if I told you that it was possible to (a) eliminate a lot of “inter-method borrow conflicts” without introducing something like view types and (b) make pinning easier even than boats’s pinned places proposal, all without needing pinned fields or even a pinned keyword? You’d probably say “Sounds great… what’s the catch?” The...

One of the better features from functional programming languages are variant types (a.k.a. algebraic data types). Basically they are a way of enumerating a small set of possibilities and then making sure that you handle every possible case. However, in real world use variant types tend to run into a few annoying problems. While working on the...

The primary means of parallel programming in Rust is tasks. Our task support is good: as good or better than any other language I’ve seen (good support for unique types and unique closures) but we have virtually no support for intra-task parallelism. The classic example is iterating over an array and processing each element in parallel. To be...