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0 pointsdvt2y ago0 comments

> ... What are you doing ? It's definitively unusual.

No it's not, it's extremely common. `Arc<Box<...>>` or `Arc<Mutex<Box<...>>>` or similar is used all the time when you want to share a mutable reference (on the heap, in the case of Box); especially in the case of interior mutability[1]. It's pretty annoying, but I have learned to love the borrow checker (although lifetime rules still confuse me). It really does make my code extremely clear, knowing exactly what parts of every struct is shareable (Arc) & mutable (Mutex).

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.h...

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Fiahil2y ago

> No it's not, it's extremely common.

Arc-Mutex yes, Arc-Box no.

It's like "I want a shared, immutable reference to something recursive, or unsized". The heap part makes no sense because it's already allocated there if you use an Arc : https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.Arc.html

> The type Arc<T> provides shared ownership of a value of type T, allocated in the heap.

Moreover, you don't even need the box for a dyn : https://gist.github.com/rust-play/f19567f8ad4cc00e3ef17ae6b3...

dvtOP2y ago

> Arc-Mutex yes, Arc-Box no.

Yeah, looks like Arc-Box is kind of pointless, but isn't there some thread locality reason why people wrap `Box` in `Arc`? I remember reading something about it a while ago but maybe I'm misremembering.

MaulingMonkey2y ago

To play devil's advocate:

`Arc<T>` places the refcounts immediately before `T` in memory. If you are desperate to have `T` and `T`'s refcounts be on different cachelines to reduce false sharing in some contrived scenario, `Arc<Box<T>>` would technically accomplish this. I think a more realistic optimization would be to pad the start of `T` however.

`Box<Box<T>>` and `Arc<Box<T>>` are thin pointers (size ≈ size_of::<usize>()) even when `Box<T>` is a fat pointer (size ≈ 2*size_of::<usize>() because `T` is `str`, `[u8]`, `dyn SomeTrait`, etc.). While various "thin" crates are typically saner alternatives for FFI or memory density (prefixing lengths/vtables in the pointed-at data instead of incurring double-indirection and double-allocation), these double boxes are a quick and dirty way of accomplishing guaranteed thin pointers with only `std` / `alloc`.

I would not call either of these use cases "extremely common" however.

YetAnotherNick2y ago

I don't exactly remember the exact thing I used that's why I said "I resorted to things like.. ". Also, I used actix web, which could be the reason of slow compiling code.

flohofwoe2y ago

At that point a regular GC is probably faster (at least from my experience of doing memory management in C++ with ref-counted smart pointers, which has a 'death-by-a-thousand-cuts' performance profile, e.g. the refcounting overhead is smeared over the whole code base and doesn't show up as obvious hotspots in the profiler).

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