Crate boar 

This crate provides flexible clone on write smart pointers with Borrowed, Owned, Arc, Rc and Static variants. They are like std’s Cow but with additonal Arc, Rc and Static variants. Unlike std’s Cow, they can also be used with types that don’t implement Clone or ToOwned.

The boar smart pointers allow you to:

• share data efficiently
• decide ownership at runtime
• avoid cloning the data until it becomes necessary

Examples

use std::sync::Arc;
use boar::BoasStr;

// No need to allocate memory for a &'static str
let title = BoasStr::Static("Dune");

// Also no need to allocate memory for a &str, that's valid for the required scope
let title = read_file("title.txt")?;
let title = BoasStr::Borrowed(&title);

// The author's name shouldn't be too long.
// So we can just store it in a normal String.
let author = BoasStr::Owned(read_file("dune/author.txt")?);

// A whole book is really long.
// And we want to share this string with multiple threads.
// So it would be efficient to store in an Arc,
// since cloning the Arc does not clone the String data inside of it.
let book_text = BoasStr::Arc(Arc::new(read_file("dune/book.txt")?));

// We can store a &str, String and Arc<String> inside the same Vec
// because we are using the BoasStr enum.
let book_infos: Vec<BoasStr> = Vec::from([title, author, book_text]);

fn read_file(path: &str) -> std::io::Result<String> {
    // ...
}

Enums

Boa

Borrowed, Owned or Arc smart pointer.

Boar

Borrowed, Owned, Arc or Rc smart pointer.

Boars

Borrowed, Owned, Arc, Rc or Static smart pointer.

Boas

Borrowed, Owned, Arc or Static smart pointer.

Type Aliases

BoaBox

Borrowed, Owned or Arc heap allocating smart pointer.

BoaTo

Borrowed, Owned or Arc smart pointer for types implementing the ToOwned (T.O.) trait.

BoaVec

Borrowed, Owned or Arc Vec smart pointer.

BoarBox

Borrowed, Owned, Arc or Rc heap allocating smart pointer.

BoarTo

Borrowed, Owned, Arc or Rc smart pointer for types implementing the ToOwned (T.O.) trait.

BoarVec

Borrowed, Owned, Arc or Rc Vec smart pointer.

BoarsBox

Borrowed, Owned, Arc, Rc or Static heap allocating smart pointer.

BoarsStr

Borrowed, Owned, Arc, Rc or Static str smart pointer.

BoarsTo

Borrowed, Owned, Arc, Rc or Static smart pointer for types implementing the ToOwned (T.O.) trait.

BoarsVec

Borrowed, Owned, Arc, Rc or Static Vec smart pointer.

BoasBox

Borrowed, Owned, Arc or Static heap allocating smart pointer.

BoasStr

Borrowed, Owned, Arc or Static str smart pointer.

BoasTo

Borrowed, Owned, Arc or Static smart pointer for types implementing the ToOwned (T.O.) trait.

BoasVec

Borrowed, Owned, Arc or Static Vec smart pointer.