rust-lang/rust — pull request #16453 by nikomatsakis (2014-08-12 17:04:25+00:00)
Title: Generalize object and type parameter bounds

Implements https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/192.

In particular:

1. type parameters can have lifetime bounds and objects can close over borrowed values, presuming that they have suitable bounds.
2. objects must have a bound, though it may be derived from the trait itself or from a `Send` bound.
3. all types must be well-formed.
4. type parameters and lifetime parameters may themselves have lifetimes as bounds. Something like `T:'a` means "the type T outlives 'a`" and something like `'a:'b`" means "'a outlives 'b". Outlives here means "all borrowed data has a lifetime at least as long".

This is a [breaking-change]. The most common things you have to fix after this change are:

1. Introduce lifetime bounds onto type parameters if your type (directly or indirectly) contains a reference. Thus a struct like `struct Ref<'a, T> { x: &'a T }` would be changed to `struct Ref<'a, T:'a> { x: &'a T }`.
2. Introduce lifetime bounds onto lifetime parameters if your type contains a double reference. Thus a type like `struct RefWrapper<'a, 'b> { r: &'a Ref<'b, int> }` (where `Ref` is defined as before) would need to be changed to `struct RefWrapper<'a, 'b:'a> { ... }`.
2. Explicitly give object lifetimes in structure definitions. Most commonly, this means changing something like `Box` to `Box`, so as to indicate that this is a reader without any borrowed data. (Note: you may wish to just change to `Box` while you're at it; it's a more restrictive type, technically, but means you can send the reader between threads.)

The intuition for points 1 and 2 is that a reference must never outlive its referent (the thing it points at). Therefore, if you have a type `&'a T`, we must know that `T` (whatever it is) outlives `'a`. And so on.