This lint is IMO inherently ill-conceived.
I have looked for the reasons why this might be thought to be a good
idea and there were basically two (and they are sort of contradictory):
I. "Calling ‘.clone()` on an Rc, Arc, or Weak can obscure the fact
that only the pointer is being cloned, not the underlying data."
This is the wording from
https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-clippy/v0.0.212/#clone_on_ref_ptr
It is a bit terse; we are left to infer why it is a bad idea to
obscure this fact. It seems to me that if it is bad to obscure some
fact, that must be because the fact is a hazard. But why would it be
a hazard to not copy the underlying data ?
In other languages, faliing to copy the underlying data is a serious
correctness hazard. There is a whose class of bugs where things were
not copied, and then mutated and/or reused in multiple places in ways
that were not what the programmer intended. In my experience, this is
a very common bug when writing Python and Javascript. I'm told it's
common in golang too.
But in Rust this bug is much much harder to write. The data inside an
Arc is immutable. To have this bug you'd have use interior mutability
- ie mess around with Mutex or RefCell. That provides a good barrier
to these kind of accidents.
II. "The reason for writing Rc::clone and Arc::clone [is] to make it
clear that only the pointer is being cloned, as opposed to the
underlying data. The former is always fast, while the latter can
be very expensive depending on what is being cloned."
This is the reasoning found here
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy/issues/2048
This is saying that *not* using Arc::clone is hazardous.
Specifically, that a deep clone is a performance hazard.
But for this argument, the lint is precisely backwards. It's linting
the "good" case and asking for it to be written in a more explicit
way; while the supposedly bad case can be written conveniently.
Also, many objects (in our codebase, and in all the libraries we use)
that are Clone are in fact simply handles. They contain Arc(s) (or
similar) and are cheap to clone. Indeed, that is the usual case.
It does not make sense to distinguish in the syntax we use to clone
such a handle, whether the handle is a transparent Arc, or an opaque
struct containing one or more other handles.
Forcing Arc::clone to be written as such makes for code churn when a
type is changed from Arc<Something> to Something: Clone, or vice
versa.
I found these versions empirically, by using the following process:
First, I used `cargo tree --depth 1 --kind all` to get a list of
every immediate dependency we had.
Then, I used `cargo upgrade --workspace package@version` to change
each dependency to the earliest version with which (in theory) the
current version is semver-compatible. IOW, if the current version
was 3.2.3, I picked "3". If the current version was 0.12.8, I
picked "0.12".
Then, I used `cargo +nightly upgrade -Z minimal-versions` to
downgrade Cargo.lock to the minimal listed version for each
dependency. (I had to override a few packages; see .gitlab-ci.yml
for details).
Finally, I repeatedly increased the version of each of our
dependencies until our code compiled and the tests passed. Here's
what I found that we need:
anyhow >= 1.0.5: Earlier versions break our hyper example.
async-broadcast >= 0.3.2: Earlier versions fail our tests.
async-compression 0.3.5: Earlier versions handled futures and tokio
differently.
async-trait >= 0.1.2: Earlier versions are too buggy to compile our
code.
clap 2.33.0: For Arg::default_value_os().
coarsetime >= 0.1.20: exposed as_ticks() function.
curve25519-dalek >= 3.2: For is_identity().
generic-array 0.14.3: Earlier versions don't implement
From<&[T; 32]>
httparse >= 1.2: Earlier versions didn't implement Error.
itertools at 0.10.1: For at_most_once.
rusqlite >= 0.26.3: for backward compatibility with older rustc.
serde 1.0.103: Older versions break our code.
serde_json >= 1.0.50: Since we need its Value type to implement Eq.
shellexpand >= 2.1: To avoid a broken dirs crate version.
tokio >= 1.4: For Handle::block_on().
tracing >= 0.1.18: Previously, tracing_core and tracing had separate
LevelFilter types.
typenum >= 1.12: Compatibility with rust-crypto crates
x25519-dalek >= 1.2.0: For was_contributory().
Closes#275.
Ian Jackson
Nick Mathewson
Daniel Eades