"lifetime" is not a rust only concept, syntactic lifetimes might be, but the idea of C APIs specifying the lifetime of a returned value is not new, novel, or rust specific.
Many C APIs have SomeLibraryCreateObject(...), SomeLibraryRetainObject(...) and SomeLibraryReleaseObject(...) - or a more basic but less flexible SomeLibraryCreateFoo() SomeLibraryFreeFoo(...).
The important thing is that the API specifies the lifetime of the returned value, idiomatic APIs do stuff like "SomeLibraryGet..." does not transfer ownership, "SomeLibraryCreate..." "SomeLibraryCopy..." etc do. Generally this works more robustly with some variation of refcounting, but you can be copy centric and say "if you want to keep this data call SomeLibraryCopy(..)".
olliej|3 years ago
"lifetime" is not a rust only concept, syntactic lifetimes might be, but the idea of C APIs specifying the lifetime of a returned value is not new, novel, or rust specific.
Many C APIs have SomeLibraryCreateObject(...), SomeLibraryRetainObject(...) and SomeLibraryReleaseObject(...) - or a more basic but less flexible SomeLibraryCreateFoo() SomeLibraryFreeFoo(...).
The important thing is that the API specifies the lifetime of the returned value, idiomatic APIs do stuff like "SomeLibraryGet..." does not transfer ownership, "SomeLibraryCreate..." "SomeLibraryCopy..." etc do. Generally this works more robustly with some variation of refcounting, but you can be copy centric and say "if you want to keep this data call SomeLibraryCopy(..)".