Reduce clones and unwraps, support partial borrows

Metadata
Point of contact	Jonathan Kelley
Teams	lang
Status	Not accepted

Motivation

For 2024H2, we propose to continue with the ergonomics initiative, targeting several of the biggest friction points in everyday Rust development. These issues affect all Rust users, but the impact and severity varies dramatically. Many experienced users have learned the workarounds and consider them papercuts, but for newer users, or in domains traditionally considered "high-level" (e.g., app/game/web development, data science, scientific computing) these kinds of issues can make Rust a non-starter. In those domains, Rust has picked up momentum as a language for building underlying frameworks and libraries thanks to its lower-level nature. However, thanks in large part to these kind of smaller, papercut issues, it is not a great choice for consumption of these libraries - many projects instead choose to expose bindings for languages like Python and JavaScript. The motivation of this project goal is to make Rust a better choice for higher level programming subfields by identifying and remedying language papercuts with minimally invasive language changes. In fact, these same issues arise in other Rust domains: for example, Rust is a great choice for network services where performance is a top consideration, but perhaps not a good choice for "everyday" request-reply services, thanks in no small part to papercuts and small-time friction (as well as other gaps like the needing more libraries, which are being addressed in the async goal).

The status quo

Rust has recently seen tremendous adoption in a number of high-profile projects. These include but are not limited to: Firecracker, Pingora, Zed, Datafusion, Candle, Gecko, Turbopack, React Compiler, Deno, Tauri, InfluxDB, SWC, Ruff, Polars, SurrealDB, NPM and more. These projects tend to power a particular field of development: SWC, React, and Turbopack powering web development, Candle powering AI/ML, Ruff powering Python, InfluxDB and Datafusion powering data science etc.

These projects tend to focus on accelerating development in higher level languages. In theory, Rust itself would be an ideal choice for development in the respective spaces. A Rust webserver can be faster and more reliable than a JavaScript webserver. However, Rust's perceived difficulty, verbosity, compile times, and iteration velocity limit its adoption in these spaces. Various language constructs nudge developers to a particular program structure that might be non-obvious at its outset, resulting in slower development times. Other language constructs influence the final architecture of a Rust program, making it harder to migrate one's mental model as they transition to using Rust. Other Rust language limitations lead to unnecessarily verbose or noisy code. While Rust is not necessarily a bad choice for any of these fields, the analogous frameworks (Axum, Bevy, Dioxus, Polars, etc) are rather nascent and frequently butt up against language limitations.

If we could make Rust a better choice for "higher level" programming - apps, games, UIs, webservers, datascience, high-performance-computing, scripting - then Rust would see much greater adoption outside its current bubble. This would result in more corporate interest, excited contributors, and generally positive growth for the language. With more "higher level" developers using Rust, we might see an uptick in adoption by startups, research-and-development teams, and the physical sciences which could lead to more general innovation.

Generally we believe this boils down to two focuses:

Make Rust programs faster to write (this goal)
Shorten the iteration cycle of a Rust program (covered in the goal on faster iterative builds)

A fictional scenario: Alex

Let's take the case of "Alex" using a fictional library "Genomix."

Alex is a genomics researcher studying ligand receptor interaction to improve drug therapy for cancer. They work with very large datasets and need to design new algorithms to process genomics data and simulate drug interactions. Alex recently heard that Rust has a great genomics library (Genomix) and decides to try out Rust for their next project. Their goal seems simple: write a program that fetches data from their research lab's S3 bucket, downloads it, cleans it, processes, and then displays it.

Alex creates a new project and starts adding various libraries. To start, they add Polars and Genomix. They also realize they want to wrap their research code in a web frontend and allow remote data, so they add Tokio, Reqwest, Axum, and Dioxus. Before writing any real code, they hit build, and immediately notice the long compilation time to build out these dependencies. They're still excited for Rust, so they get a coffee and wait.

They start banging out code. They are getting a lot of surprising compilation errors around potential failures. They don't really care much about error handling at the moment; some googling reveals that a lot of code just calls unwrap in this scenario, so they start adding that in, but the code is looking kind of ugly and non-elegant.

They are also getting compilation errors. After some time they come to understand how the borrow checker works. Many of the errors can be resolved by calling clone, so they are doing that a lot. They even find a few bugs, which they like. But they eventually get down to some core problems that they just can't see how to fix, and where it feels like the compiler is just being obstinate. For example, they'd like to extract a method like fn push_log(&mut self, item: T) but they can't, because they are iterating over data in self.input_queue and the compiler gives them errors, even though push_log doesn't touch input_queue. "Do I just have to copy and paste my code everywhere?", they wonder. Similarly, when they use closures that spawn threads, the new thread seems to take ownership of the value, they eventually find themselves writing code like let _data = data.clone() and using that from inside the closure. Irritating.

Eventually they do get the system to work, but it takes them a lot longer than they feel it should, and the code doesn't look nearly as clean as they hoped. They are seriously wondering if Rust is as good as it is made out to be, and nervous about having interns or other newer developers try to use it. "Rust seems to make sense for really serious projects, but for the kind of things I do, it's just so much slower.", they think.

Key points:

Upfront compile times would be in the order of minutes
Adding new dependencies would also incur a strong compile time cost
Iterating on the program would take several seconds per build
Adding a web UI would be arduous with copious calls .clone() to shuffle state around
Lots of explicit unwraps pollute the codebase
Refactoring to a collection of structs might take much longer than they anticipated

A real world scenario, lightly fictionalized

Major cloud developer is "all in" on Rust. As they build out code, though, they notice some problems leading to copying-and-pasting or awkward code throughout their codebase. Spawning threads and tasks tends to involve a large number of boilerplate feeling "clone" calls to copy out specific handles from data structures -- it's tough to get rid of them, even with macros. There are a few Rust experts at the company, and they're in high demand helping users resolve seemingly simple problems -- many of them have known workaround patterns, but those patterns are non-obvious, and sometimes rather involved. For example, sometimes they have to make "shadow structs" that have all the same fields, but just contain different kinds of references, to avoid conflicting borrows. For the highest impact systems, Rust remains popular, but for a lot of stuff "on the edge", developers shy away from it. "I'd like to use Rust there," they say, "since it would help me find bugs and get higher performance, but it's just too annoying. It's not worth it."

The next six months

For 2024H2 we have identified two key changes that would make Rust significantly easier to write across a wide variety of domains:

Reducing the frequency of an explicit ".clone()" for cheaply cloneable items
Partial borrows for structs (especially private &mut self methods that only access a few fields)

Reducing `.clone()` frequency

Across web, game, UI, app, and even systems development, it's common to share semaphores across scopes. These come in the form of channels, queues, signals, and immutable state typically wrapped in Arc/Rc. In Rust, to use these items across scopes - like tokio::spawn or 'static closures, a programmer must explicitly call .clone(). This is frequently accompanied by a rename of an item:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
let state = Arc::new(some_state);

let _state = state.clone();
tokio::spawn(async move { /*code*/ });

let _state = state.clone();
tokio::spawn(async move { /*code*/ });

let _state = state.clone();
let callback = Callback::new(move |_| { /*code*/ });
}

This can become both noisy - clone pollutes a codebase - and confusing - what does .clone() imply on this item? Calling .clone() could imply an allocation or simply a RefCount increment. In many cases it's not possible to understand the behavior without viewing the clone implementation directly.

A higher level Rust would provide a mechanism to cut down on these clones entirely, making code terser and potentially clearer about intent:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
let state = Arc::new(some_state);

tokio::spawn(async move { /*code*/ });

tokio::spawn(async move { /*code*/ });

let callback = Callback::new(move |_| { /*code*/ });
}

While we don't necessarily propose any one solution to this problem, we believe Rust can be tweaked in way that makes these explicit calls to .clone() disappear without significant changes to the language.

Partial borrows for structs

Another complication programmers run into is when designing the architecture of their Rust programs with structs. A programmer might start with code that looks like this:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
let name = "Foo ";
let mut children = vec!["Bar".to_string()];

children.push(name.to_string())
}

And then decide to abstract it into a more traditional struct-like approach:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
struct Baz {
    name: String,
    children: Vec<String>
}

impl Baz {
    pub fn push_name(&mut self, new: String) {
        let name = self.name()
        self.push(new);
        println!("{name} pushed item {new}");
    }

    fn push(&mut self, item: &str) {
        self.children.push(item)
    }

    fn name(&self) -> &str {
        self.name.as_str()
    }
}
}

While this code is similar to the original snippet, it no longer compiles. Because self.name borrows Self, we can't call self.push without running into lifetime conflicts. However, semantically, we haven't violated the borrow checker - both push and name read and write different fields of the struct.

Interestingly, Rust's disjoint capture mechanism for closures, can perform the same operation and compile.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
let mut modify_something =  || s.name = "modified".to_string();
let read_something =  || &s.children.last().unwrap().name;

let o2 = read_something();
let o1 = modify_something();
println!("o: {:?}", o2);
}

This is a very frequent papercut for both beginner and experienced Rust programmers. A developer might design a valid abstraction for a particular problem, but the Rust compiler rejects it even though said design does obey the axioms of the borrow checker.

As part of the "higher level Rust" effort, we want to reduce the frequency of this papercut, making it easier for developers to model and iterate on their program architecture.

For example, a syntax-free approach to solving this problem might be simply turning on disjoint capture for private methods only. Alternatively, we could implement a syntax or attribute that allows developers to explicitly opt in to the partial borrow system. Again, we don't want to necessarily prescribe a solution here, but the best outcome would be a solution that reduces mental overhead with as little new syntax as possible.

The "shiny future" we are working towards

A "high level Rust" would be a Rust that has a strong focus on iteration speed. Developers would benefit from Rust's performance, safety, and reliability guarantees without the current status quo of long compile times, verbose code, and program architecture limitations.

A "high level" Rust would:

Compile quickly, even for fresh builds
Be terse in the common case
Produce performant programs even in debug mode
Provide language shortcuts to get to running code faster

In our "shiny future," an aspiring genomics researcher would:

be able to quickly jump into a new project
add powerful dependencies with little compile-time cost
use various procedural macros with little compile-time cost
cleanly migrate their existing program architecture to Rust with few lifetime issues
employ various shortcuts like unwrap to get to running code quicker

Revisiting Alex and Genomix

Let's revisit the scenario of "Alex" using a fictional library "Genomix."

Alex creates a new project and starts adding various libraries. To start, they add Polars and Genomix. They also realize they want to wrap their research code in a web frontend and allow remote data, so they add Tokio, Reqwest, Axum, and Dioxus. They write a simple program that fetches data from their research lab's S3 bucket, downloads it, cleans it, processes, and then displays it.

For the first time, they type cargo run. The project builds in 10 seconds and their code starts running. The analysis churns for a bit and then Alex is greeted with a basic webpage visualizing their results. They start working on the visualization interface, adding interactivity with new callbacks and async routines. Thanks to hotreloading, the webpage updates without fully recompiling and losing program state.

Once satisfied, Alex decides to refactor their messy program into different structs so that they can reuse the different pieces for other projects. They add basic improvements like multithreading and swap out the unwrap shortcuts for proper error handling.

Alex heard Rust was difficult to learn, but they're generally happy. Their Rust program is certainly faster than their previous Python work. They didn't need to learn JavaScript to wrap it in a web frontend. The Cargo.toml is a cool - they can share their work with the research lab without messing with Python installs and dependency management. They heard Rust had long compile times but didn't run into that. Being able to add async and multithreading was easier than they thought - interacting with channels and queues was as easy as it was in Go.

Design axioms

Preference for minimally invasive changes that have the greatest potential benefit
No or less syntax is preferable to more syntax for the same goal
Prototype code should receive similar affordances as production code
Attention to the end-to-end experience of a Rust developer
Willingness to make appropriate tradeoffs in favor of implementation speed and intuitiveness

Ownership and team asks

The work here is proposed by Jonathan Kelley on behalf of Dioxus Labs. We have funding for 1-2 engineers depending on the scope of work. Dioxus Labs is willing to take ownership and commit funding to solve these problems.

Task	Owner(s) or team(s)	Notes
`.clone()` problem	Jonathan Kelley + tbd
partial borrows	Jonathan Kelley + tbd
`.unwrap()` problem	Jonathan Kelley + tbd
Named/Optional arguments	Jonathan Kelley + tbd

The badge indicates a requirement where Team support is needed.

Support needed from the project

We are happy to author RFCs and/or work with other experienced RFC authors.
We are happy to host design meetings, facilitate work streams, logistics, and any other administration required to execute. Some subgoals proposed might be contentious or take longer than this goals period, and we're committed to timelines beyond six months.
We are happy to author code or fund the work for an experienced Rustlang contributor to do the implementation. For the language goals, we expect more design required than actual implementation. For cargo-related goals, we expected more engineering required than design. We are also happy to back any existing efforts as there is ongoing work in cargo itself to add various types of caching.
We would be excited to write blog posts about this effort. This goals program is a great avenue for us to get more corporate support and see more Rust adoption for higher-level paradigms. Having a blog post talking about this work would be a significant step in changing the perception of Rust for use in high-level codebases.

Outputs and milestones

Outputs

Final outputs that will be produced

Milestones

Milestones you will reach along the way

Frequently asked questions

After these two items, are we done? What comes next?

We will have made significant process, but we won't be done. We have identified two particular items that come up frequently in the "high level app dev" domain but which will require more discussion to reach alignment. These could be candidates for future goals.

Faster Unwrap Syntax (Contentious)

Another common criticism of Rust in prototype-heavy programming subfields is its pervasive verbosity - especially when performing rather simple or innocuous transformations. Admittedly, even as experienced Rust programmers, we find ourselves bogged down by the noisiness of various language constructs. In our opinion, the single biggest polluter of prototype Rust codebase is the need to call .unwrap() everywhere. While yes, many operations can fail and it's a good idea to handle errors, we've generally found that .unwrap() drastically hinders development in higher level paradigms.

Whether it be simple operations like getting the last item from a vec:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
let items = vec![1,2,3,4];
let last = items.last().unwrap();
}

Or slightly more involved operations like fetching from a server:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
let res = Client::new()
	.unwrap()
	.get("https://dog.ceo/api/breeds/list/all")
	.header("content/text".parse().unwrap())
	.send()
	.unwrap()
	.await
	.unwrap()
	.json::<DogApi>()
	.await
	.unwrap();
}

It's clear that .unwrap() plays a large role in the early steps of every Rust codebase.

A "higher level Rust" would be a Rust that enables programmers to quickly prototype their solution, iterating on architecture and functionality before finally deciding to "productionize" their code. In today's Rust this is equivalent to replacing .unwrap() with proper error handling (or .expect()), adding documentation, and adding tests.

Programmers generally understand the difference between prototype code and production code - they don't necessarily need to be so strongly reminded that their code is prototype code by forcing a verbose .unwrap() at every corner. In many ways, Rust today feels hostile to prototype code. We believe that a "higher level Rust" should be welcoming to prototype code. The easier it is for developers to write prototype code, the more code will likely convert to production code. Prototype code by design is the first step to production code.

When this topic comes up, folks will invariably bring up Result plus ? as a solution. In practice, we've not found it to be a suitable bandaid. Adopting question mark syntax requires you to change the signatures of your code at every turn. While prototyping you can no longer think in terms of A -> B but now you need to think of every A -> B? as a potentially fallible operation. The final production-ready iteration of your code will likely not be fallible in every method, forcing yet another level of refactoring. Plus, question mark syntax tends to bubble errors without line information, generally making it difficult to locate where the error is occurring in the first place. And finally, question mark syntax doesn't work on Option<T>, meaning .unwrap() or pattern matching are the only valid options.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
let items = vec![1,2,3,4];
let last = items.last().unwrap(); // <--- this can't be question-marked!
}

We don't prescribe any particular solution, but ideally Rust would provide a similar shortcut for .unwrap() as it does for return Err(e). Other languages tend to use a ! operator for this case:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
let items = vec![1,2,3,4];
let last = items.last()!;

let res = Client::new()!
	.get("https://dog.ceo/api/breeds/list/all")
	.header("content/text".parse()!)
	.send()!
	.await!
	.json::<DogApi>()
	.await!;
}

A "higher level Rust" would provide similar affordances to prototype code that it provides to production code. All production code was once prototype code. Today's Rust makes it harder to write prototype code than it does production code. This language-level opinion is seemingly unique to Rust and arguably a major factor in why Rust has seen slower adoption in higher level programming paradigms.

Named and Optional Arguments or Partial Defaults (Contentious)

Beyond .clone() and .unwrap(), the next biggest polluter for "high level" Rust code tends to be the lack of a way to properly supply optional arguments to various operations. This has received lots of discussion already and we don't want to belabor the point anymore than it already has.

The main thing we want to add here is that we believe the builder pattern is not a great solution for this problem, especially during prototyping and in paradigms where iteration time is important.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
struct PlotCfg {
   title: Option<String>,
   height: Option<u32>,
   width: Option<u32>,
   dpi: Option<u32>,
   style: Option<Style>
}

impl PlotCfg {
    pub fn title(&mut self, title: Option<u32>) -> &mut self {
        self.title = title;
        self
    }
    pub fn height(&mut self, height: Option<u32>) -> &mut self {
        self.height = height;
        self
    }
    pub fn width(&mut self, width: Option<u32>) -> &mut self {
        self.width = width;
        self
    }
    pub fn dpi(&mut self, dpi: Option<u32>) -> &mut self {
        self.dpi = dpi;
        self
    }
    pub fn style(&mut self, style: Option<u32>) -> &mut self {
        self.style = style;
        self
    }
    pub fn build() -> Plot {
	    todo!()
    }
}
}

A solution to this problem could in any number of forms:

Partial Defaults to structs
Named and optional function arguments
Anonymous structs

We don't want to specify any particular solution:

Partial defaults simply feel like an extension of the language
Named function arguments would be a very welcome change for many high-level interfaces
Anonymous structs would be useful outside of replacing builders

Generally though, we feel like this is another core problem that needs to be solved for Rust to see more traction in higher-level programming paradigms.

Rust Project Goals