pub auto trait Unpin { }
Expand description
Types that can be safely moved after being pinned.
Rust itself has no notion of immovable types, and considers moves (e.g.,
through assignment or mem::replace
) to always be safe.
The Pin
type is used instead to prevent moves through the type
system. Pointers P<T>
wrapped in the Pin<P<T>>
wrapper can’t be
moved out of. See the pin
module documentation for more information on
pinning.
Implementing the Unpin
trait for T
lifts the restrictions of pinning off
the type, which then allows moving T
out of Pin<P<T>>
with
functions such as mem::replace
.
Unpin
has no consequence at all for non-pinned data. In particular,
mem::replace
happily moves !Unpin
data (it works for any &mut T
, not
just when T: Unpin
). However, you cannot use mem::replace
on data
wrapped inside a Pin<P<T>>
because you cannot get the &mut T
you
need for that, and that is what makes this system work.
So this, for example, can only be done on types implementing Unpin
:
use std::mem;
use std::pin::Pin;
let mut string = "this".to_string();
let mut pinned_string = Pin::new(&mut string);
// We need a mutable reference to call `mem::replace`.
// We can obtain such a reference by (implicitly) invoking `Pin::deref_mut`,
// but that is only possible because `String` implements `Unpin`.
mem::replace(&mut *pinned_string, "other".to_string());
This trait is automatically implemented for almost every type.