Ergonomic Self-Referential Types for Rust

Yoshua Wuyts discusses the concept of Ergonomic Self-Referential Types for Rust, aiming to make self-referential types more accessible to regular Rust programmers. The key components involved are the ability to write 'self lifetimes, construct types in fixed memory locations, mark types as "immovable," and safely initialize self-references in structs. The discussion includes a motivating example using async {} and Future to illustrate how these features can work together. The post emphasizes the importance of tracking references into data when dealing with complex state machines. Additionally, it explores the challenges around self-referential lifetimes, constructing types in-place, and converting them into immovable types. The post also touches on the potential future improvements in Rust's type system to simplify the process of handling self-referential types. Yoshua Wuyts acknowledges the collaborative effort with Eric Holk in exploring the implications of !Move and self-referential types. The post concludes by highlighting that it is an early exploration to narrow down the design space for feedback from the Rust community.