Description
Proposal
Problem statement
NonNull is missing a bunch of the usual methods on pointers, resulting in code needing to extract the underlying pointer, do the operation, and put it back again
The safety requirements on add/sub prohibit the resulting pointer from ever being null -- no object can be located at null, nor can the past-the-end pointer be null -- so it would be nice not to have to re-prove that for the NonNull constructor every time they're used.
Motivating examples or use cases
As of https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/114205/files#diff-430db13219f4c1ac4f4d35f685a45778572e039dab837c5ffeec9a810fc547b4 these are already marked unstable, but as std_internals, because they're useful for writing iterators outside of core.
Solution sketch
Thus this proposes just promoting these methods from doc(hidden) to stabilization-track nightly methods.
Alternatives
They're not necessary, of course, and people could continue doing the as_ptr-then-reconstruct dance.
Links and related work
The num::NonZero types similarly have the methods that work without the possibility of violating the non-zero invariant, so doing the same for NonNull sounds at least plausible.
What happens now?
This issue is part of the libs-api team API change proposal process. Once this issue is filed the libs-api team will review open proposals as capability becomes available. Current response times do not have a clear estimate, but may be up to several months.
Possible responses
The libs team may respond in various different ways. First, the team will consider the problem (this doesn't require any concrete solution or alternatives to have been proposed):
- We think this problem seems worth solving, and the standard library might be the right place to solve it.
- We think that this probably doesn't belong in the standard library.
Second, if there's a concrete solution:
- We think this specific solution looks roughly right, approved, you or someone else should implement this. (Further review will still happen on the subsequent implementation PR.)
- We're not sure this is the right solution, and the alternatives or other materials don't give us enough information to be sure about that. Here are some questions we have that aren't answered, or rough ideas about alternatives we'd want to see discussed.
Activity