Comment by jcranmer

Yes and no.

In my case, I have code that essentially looks like this:

   struct Parser {
     state: ParserState
   }
   struct Subparser {
     state: ParserState
   }
   impl Parser {
     pub fn parse_something(&mut self) -> Subparser {
       Subparse { state: self.state } // NOTE: doesn't work
     }
   }
   impl Drop for Subparser {
     fn drop(&mut self) {
       parser.state = self.state; // NOTE: really doesn't work
     }
   }

Okay, I can make the first line work by changing Parser.state to be an Option<ParserState> instead and using Option::take (or std::mem::replace on a custom enum; going from an &mut T to a T is possible in a number of ways). But how do I give Subparser the ability to give its ParserState back to the original parser? If I could make Subparser take a lifetime and just have a pointer to Parser.state, I wouldn't even bother with half of this setup because I would just reach into the Parser directly, but that's not an option in this case. (The safe Rust option I eventually reached for is a oneshot channel, which is actually a lot of overhead for this case).

It's the give-back portion of the borrow-to-give-back pattern that ends up being gnarly. I'm actually somewhat disappointed that the Rust ecosystem has in general given up on trying to build up safe pointer abstractions in the ecosystem, like doing use tracking for a pointed-to object. FWIW, a rough C++ implementation of what I would like to do is this:

  template <typename T> class HotPotato {
    T *data;
    HotPotato<T> *borrowed_from = nullptr, *given_to = nullptr;

    public:
    T *get_data() {
      // If we've given the data out, we can't use it at the moment.
      return given_to ? nullptr : data;
    }
    std::unique_ptr<HotPotato<T>> borrow() {
      assert(given_to == nullptr);
      auto *new_holder = new HotPotato();
      new_holder->data = data;
      new_holder->borrowed_from = this;
      given_to = new_holder;
    }

    ~HotPotato() {
      if (given_to) {
        given_to->borrowed_from = borrowed_from;
      }
      if (borrowed_from) {
        borrowed_from->given_to = given_to;
      } else {
        delete data;
      }
    }
  };