27 releases (13 stable)
new 2.8.0 | Apr 12, 2024 |
---|---|
2.6.0 | Mar 24, 2024 |
1.0.1 | Jan 6, 2024 |
0.5.3 | Dec 26, 2023 |
0.4.3 | Sep 8, 2023 |
#1336 in Data structures
1,058 downloads per month
Used in 9 crates
57KB
958 lines
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:
Method | Expected Behavior |
---|---|
push(new_element) |
does not change the memory locations of the n elements |
extend_from_slice(slice) |
does not change the memory locations of the first n elements |
insert(a, new_element) |
does not change the memory locations of the first a elements, where a <= n ; elements to the right of the inserted element might be changed, commonly shifted to right |
pop() |
does not change the memory locations of the first n-1 elements, the n -th element is removed |
remove(a) |
does not change the memory locations of the first a elements, where a < n ; elements to the right of the removed element might be changed, commonly shifted to left |
truncate(a) |
does not change the memory locations of the first a elements, where a < n |
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 necessary.
- It is critical in enabling efficient, convenient and safe self-referential collections with thin references, see
SelfRefCol
for details, and its special cases such asLinkedList
. - 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 asBox
orRc
or etc. - It is important for concurrent programs since it eliminates safety concerns related with elements implicitly carried to different memory locations. This helps reducing and dealing with the complexity of concurrency.
ConcurrentBag
is a very simplistic and efficient concurrent data structure built on top of pinned vector guarantees.
C. Implementations
SplitVec
and FixedVec
are two efficient implementations.
License
This library is licensed under MIT license. See LICENSE for details.