Rich Phantoms

An implementation of phantom types in rust with control over variance and inheritance of send/sync.

They are all just type aliases for PhantomData, so work in const and non-sized contexts too.

Introduction

PhantomData<T> is covariant and is only Send+Sync when T is. This may not be the semantics you want - since it is zero-sized it is safe to make send/sync, or you may never want send/sync. If your data type is contravariant then you can't use PhantomData<T> either.

This library provides phantom types which allow you to specify the variance and send/sync inheritance that you want. See this discussion for more details.

Suggestions and contributions welcome!

Example

Here you can see that a non-send/sync inner type doesn't affect the wrapper type, and that the 'const lifetime gets cast into a 'a lifetime.

fn main() {
    let x: PhantomCovariantAlwaysSendSync<*const ()> = PhantomData;
    fn f<'a>(_: PhantomCovariantAlwaysSendSync<&'a ()>) {}
    f(x);
    let _y: &(dyn Send + Sync) = &x;
}

And here is the opposite example, a send/sync inner type and a contravariant, never-inheriting phantom type - the 'a is cast to the 'static lifetime:

fn main() {
    fn s(_: PhantomContravariantNeverSendSync<&'static ()>) {}
    fn f<'a>() {
        let x: PhantomContravariantAlwaysSendSync<&'a ()> = PhantomData;
        // let _y: &(dyn Send + Sync) = &x; COMPILE ERROR
        s(x); // WORKS
    }
}

Tests

There are tests for all the variants which prove the send/sync inheritance (including compile-fail tests when the phantom type should not be send/sync), as well as (positive) tests for the correct kind of variance.

Additionally there is a feature-gated test which runs under -Z force-unstable-if-unmarked, #![feature(staged_api)], and #![feature(const_fn)]. To run this test use (on nightly): cargo test --features unstable-test.

License

Licensed under either of

Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution