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Comment by Arnavion | Hacker News Reader

>But with the upcoming support for passing an allocator to any data structure (in the Rust standard library anyway) I think this gets a lot easier?

Yes and no. Even within libstd, some things require A=GlobalAlloc, eg `std::io::Read::read_to_end(&mut Vec<u8>)` will only accept Vec<u8, GlobalAlloc>. It cannot be changed to work with Vec<u8, A> because that change would make it not dyn-compatible (nee "object-safe").

And as you said it will cut you off from much of the third-party crates ecosystem that also assumes A=GlobalAlloc.

But if the subset of libstd you need supports A=!GlobalAlloc then yes it's helpful.

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If the `A` generic parameters were changed to be ?Sized, it would still be possible to make `read_to_end` support custom allocators by changing the signature to `read_to_end(&mut dyn Vec<u8, Allocator>)`

Not sure if that is a breaking change though, it probably is because of a small detail, I'm not a rustc dev.

First of all, `dyn Vec` is impossible. Vec is a concrete type, not a trait. I assume you meant `Vec<u8, dyn Allocator>`.

Second, no a `&mut Vec<u8, A>` is not convertible to `&mut Vec<u8, dyn Allocator>`. This kind of unsized coercion cannot work because it'll require a whole different Vec to be constructed, one which has an `allocator: dyn Allocator` field (which is unsized, and thus makes the Vec unsized) instead of an `allocator: A` field. The unsized coercion you're thinking of is for converting trait object references to unsized trait object references; here we're talking about a field behind a reference.

Sorry, I meant `&Vec<T, dyn Allocator>`.

And no, it is possible. Here is an example that does it with BufReader, which has T: ?Sized and uses it as a field: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

Though it comes with a caveat that you can't take self by value, which is perfectly fine for this use case & is what a normal allocator-aware language does anyway.

I stand corrected. I didn't know rustc supported such a coercion automatically. Now I see it is documented in CoerceUnsized + Unsize.

That said, other than the problem of this being a breaking API change for Read::read_to_end, another problem is that Vec's layout is { RawVec, len } and the allocator is inside RawVec, so the allocator is not the last field of Vec, which is required for structs to contain unsized fields. It would require reordering Vec's fields to { len, RawVec } which may not be something libstd wants to do (since it'll make data ptr access have an offset from Vec ptr), or to inline RawVec into Vec as { ptr, cap, len, allocator }.

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