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Comment by pornel

This can be done with exclusively owned objects. That's how io_uring abstractions work in Rust – you give your (heap allocated) buffer to a buffer pool, and get it back when the operation is done.

&mut references are exclusive and non-copyable, so the hot potato approach can even be used within their scope.

But the problem in Rust is that threads can unwind/exit at any time, invalidating buffers living on the stack, and io_uring may use the buffer for longer than the thread lives.

The borrow checker only checks what code is doing, but doesn't have power to alter runtime behavior (it's not a GC after all), so it only can prevent io_uring abstractions from getting any on-stack buffers, but has no power to prevent threads from unwinding to make on-stack buffer safe instead.

parent pornel 1 year ago

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