owning-ref-rs VS string

Increasingly feeling that Rust is like Elm: a language with novel ideas, teaching valuable lessons (a vocabulary for teaching and checking thread safety, documenting exclusive vs. shared mutability in the type system, arguably a vocabulary for teaching and checking memory safety, though that comes at a steep cost), yet so stubborn the community treats its values (avoiding shared mutability) as moral judgments of code, and the language and deliberately obstructs writing code outside of approved patterns (single ownership tree, exclusive mutability). struct{Cell...}& doesn't need to be harder to use than C++ struct{T...}*, but Rust keeps it difficult because the community views it as bad code design and wants to keep it hard. And *mut T lacks RAII unlike C++'s unique_ptr, and requires unsafe blocks in every dereference. As a result, people turn to unsound patterns like https://github.com/kimundi/owning-ref-rs, https://github.com/mcoblenz/Bronze/, and https://github.com/emu-rs/snes-apu/blob/master/src/smp.rs#L5....

It's a good language to learn. I hesitate to consider it a replacement for asm/C/C++. Writing rust is hoping that the code you're porting to rust can adapt well to the restrictions, and if not, searching for esoteric and needlessly unsafe/verbose workarounds.

Note that there are other soundness issues that require more fundamental changes to be fixed.

That's a shame. I dug into owning_ref, and it looks like it has an open soundness bug as well.

If they do need to be string slices, you could wrap bytes::Bytes inside String from the string crate. Parsing generally results in a bunch of &strs borrowed from the String, and you'll want the slice_ref method added by this PR to turn the slices back into unborrowed String instances efficiently (no copying or UTF-8 checking, just incrementing an atomic reference counter).