## Note This crate has been republished because of popular demand to publish the fixed fork as a crate. However, I can't make any guarantees about the safety of this crate, and I won't necessarilly be able to actively maintain it. safer_owning_ref ============== A library for creating references that carry their owner with them. This can sometimes be useful because Rust borrowing rules normally prevent moving a type that has been borrowed from. For example, this kind of code gets rejected: ```rust fn return_owned_and_referenced<'a>() -> (Vec, &'a [u8]) { let v = vec![1, 2, 3, 4]; let s = &v[1..3]; (v, s) } ``` This library enables this safe usage by keeping the owner and the reference bundled together in a wrapper type that ensure that lifetime constraint: ```rust fn return_owned_and_referenced() -> OwningRef, [u8]> { let v = vec![1, 2, 3, 4]; let or = OwningRef::new(v); let or = or.map(|v| &v[1..3]); or } ``` ## Getting Started To get started, add the following to `Cargo.toml`. ```toml safer_owning_ref = "0.5.0" ``` (Note: The package's name is `safer_owning_ref`, but the crate name is still `owning_ref`). ...and see the [docs](https://docs.rs/safer_owning_ref/latest/) for how to use it. ## Example ```rust extern crate owning_ref; use owning_ref::BoxRef; fn main() { // Create an array owned by a Box. let arr = Box::new([1, 2, 3, 4]) as Box<[i32]>; // Transfer into a BoxRef. let arr: BoxRef<[i32]> = BoxRef::new(arr); assert_eq!(&*arr, &[1, 2, 3, 4]); // We can slice the array without losing ownership or changing type. let arr: BoxRef<[i32]> = arr.map(|arr| &arr[1..3]); assert_eq!(&*arr, &[2, 3]); // Also works for Arc, Rc, String and Vec! } ```