orx-pinned-vec

PinnedVec trait defines the interface for vectors which guarantee that elements added to the vector are pinned to their memory locations unless explicitly changed.

A. Pinned Elements Guarantee

A PinnedVec guarantees that positions of its elements do not change implicitly.

To be specific, let's assume that a pinned vector currently has n elements:

Note that this eliminates a certain set of errors that are easy to make in some languages and forbidden by the borrow checker in rust. Consider, for example, the classical example that does not compile in rust. The reason this code has a bug is due to the fact that the elements of the standard vector are not pinned to their memory locations and it is possible that the push leads to changing them all together. Using a pinned vector, on the other hand, this would be a memory safe operation.

let mut vec = vec![0, 1, 2, 3];

let ref_to_first = &vec[0];
assert_eq!(ref_to_first, &0);

vec.push(4);

// does not compile due to the following reason:  cannot borrow `vec` as mutable because it is also borrowed as immutable
// assert_eq!(ref_to_first, &0);

PinnedVec trait on its own cannot provide the pinned element guarantee; hence, it could be considered as a marker trait.

However, this crate additionally provides the test function to assert these guarantees:

pub fn test_pinned_vec<P: PinnedVec<usize>>(pinned_vec: P, test_vec_len: usize) {
    // ...
}

This function performs an extensive test on the specific implementation P and fails if any of the above guarantees is not provided.

Note that std::vec::Vec does not provide the pinned elements during growth guarantee. You may find a wrapper struct JustVec which is nothing but the standard vec here: src/pinned_vec_tests/test_all.rs. As expected, test_pinned_vec method fails for this struct.

B. Motivation

There are various situations where pinned elements are critical.

• It is critical in enabling efficient, convenient and safe self-referential collections with thin references, see SelfRefCol for details, and its special cases such as LinkedList.
• It is important for concurrent programs as it eliminates safety concerns related with elements implicitly carried to different memory locations. This helps reducing and dealing with the complexity of concurrency, and leads to efficient concurrent data structures. See ConcurrentIter, ConcurrentBag or ConcurrentOrderedBag for such concurrent data structures which are conveniently built on the pinned element guarantees of pinned vectors.
• It is essential in allowing an immutable push vector; i.e., ImpVec. This is a very useful operation when the desired collection is a bag or a container of things, rather than having a collective meaning. In such cases, ImpVec allows avoiding certain borrow checker complexities, heap allocations and wide pointers such as Box or Rc or etc.

C. Implementations

SplitVec and FixedVec are two efficient implementations.

License

This library is licensed under MIT license. See LICENSE for details.