rust-lang / rust-lang/hashbrown

get_many_mut with variable number of keys

Open
#332 18 comments 3 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
3k
Forks
358
Avg merge
11h 57m
Merged PRs (30d)
2

Description

get_many_mut on slices (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/83608) does not need to handle a variable number of keys (although it might be nice) because, worse case scenario, you can sort your input array of indexes and iterate over it with successive split_at_mut.

In this case however, that's not an option, as HashMaps don't have the equivalent of split_at_mut.
So it may be useful to be able to lookup a variable (somewhat large) number of distinct keys at the same time in a HashMap, and get mutable references back.

That is in particular needed when we have a storage of many entries, and we want to run a round of updates on distinct subsets of keys, and want to run these in parallel.

Having get_many_mut follow a similar model to what is described at https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/83608#pullrequestreview-966536956 and providing an interface that allows for this would consequently be useful - in fact, that is something I currently would use.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the get_many_mut interface discussed in Rust PR 83608 and compare its slice-based model with HashMap access in hashbrown. Define how a variable, somewhat large number of distinct keys should yield mutable references and support parallel updates; the issue does not name a file or test to run.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
backend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.