Proposal

Problem statement

Quoting documentation of BorrowedCursor:

Once data is written to the cursor, it becomes part of the filled portion of the underlying BorrowedBuf and can no longer be accessed or re-written by the cursor.

However, doing so may be really useful, for example in Read wrappers that read back the data read in the inner reader. With the current API, read_buf can only be implemented by initializing the whole buffer and forwarding to read or using unsafe code to craft a new BorrowedCursor.

Motivating examples or use cases

A crc32 checker example simplified from zip crate (original source):

pub struct Crc32Reader<R> {
    inner: R,
    hasher: Hasher,
    check: u32,
}

impl<R> Crc32Reader<R> {
    fn check_matches(&self) -> bool {
        self.check == self.hasher.clone().finalize()
    }
}

impl<R: Read> Read for Crc32Reader<R> {
    fn read(&mut self, buf: &mut [u8]) -> io::Result<usize> {
        let count = self.inner.read(buf)?;
        if count == 0 && !buf.is_empty() && !self.check_matches() {
            return Err(io::Error::new(io::ErrorKind::Other, "Invalid checksum"))
        }
        self.hasher.update(&buf[..count]);
        Ok(count)
    }

    fn read_buf(&mut self, mut cursor: BorrowedCursor<'_>) -> io::Result<()> {
        let written = cursor.written();
        self.inner.read_buf(cursor.reborrow())?;
        if cursor.written() == written && cursor.capacity() != 0 && !self.check_matches() {
            return Err(io::Error::new(io::ErrorKind::Other, "Invalid checksum"))
        }
        // We can't write this line
        // self.hasher.update(cursor.written_data());
        Ok(count)
    }
}

In this code, a specialized read_buf implementation that forward to self.inner.read_buf() is desirable, but not really possible without unsafe code.

Solution sketch

Add new method to BorrowedCursor that creates a BorrowedBuf from it, which would allow reading back the written data (not tested):

impl BurrowedCursor<'_> {
    fn unfilled_buf(&mut self) -> BorrowedBuf<'_> {
        // Note: this function can already be written using only public (unsafe) APIs.
        let init = self.buf.init - self.buf.filled;

        BorrowedBuf {
            buf: unsafe { self.as_mut() },
            filled: 0,
            init,
        }
    }
}

With this, read_buf function from the previous example could be written as:

impl<R: Read> Read for Crc32Reader<R> {
    fn read_buf(&mut self, mut cursor: BorrowedCursor<'_>) -> io::Result<()> {
        let mut buf = cursor.unfilled_buf();
        self.inner.read_buf(buf.unfilled())?;

        if buf.len() == 0 && buf.capacity() != 0 && !self.check_matches() {
            return Err(io::Error::new(io::ErrorKind::Other, "Invalid checksum"))
        }
        self.hasher.update(buf.filled());
        let init = buf.len();
        cursor.advance(init);
        Ok(())
    }
}

Alternatives

Do nothing and say the the current state is fine.
Provide the function via From<&'data mut BorrowCursor<'_>> for BorrowedBuf<'data> to make it consistent with other ways to create a BorrowedBuf

As is, using unfilled_buf and advance make it compulsory to have a panic branch (in advance) and the risk to forget advancing (especially in error branches). There could be a method that takes a closure and does everything right:

impl BorrowCursor<'_> {
  fn with_unfilled_buf<T>(&mut self, f: impl FnOnce(&mut BorrowedBuf<'_>) -> T) -> T {
      let mut buf = self.unfilled_buf();
      let result = f(&mut buf);

      let filled = buf.len();
      // SAFETY: `filled` bytes were written to the cursor
      unsafe { self.advance_unchecked(filled) };
      result
  }
}

Links and related work

What happens now?

This issue contains an API change proposal (or ACP) and is part of the libs-api team feature lifecycle. 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.

rust-lang / libs-team

Enable accessing written data in a `BorrowedCursor` #367