- Start Date: 2014-06-15
- RFC PR #: rust-lang/rfcs#123
- Rust Issue #: rust-lang/rust#16281
Rename the Share trait to Sync
With interior mutability, the name "immutable pointer" for a value of type &T
is not quite accurate. Instead, the term "shared reference" is becoming popular
to reference values of type &T. The usage of the term "shared" is in conflict
with the Share trait, which is intended for types which can be safely shared
concurrently with a shared reference.
Rename the Share trait in std::kinds to Sync. Documentation would
refer to &T as a shared reference and the notion of "shared" would simply mean
"many references" while Sync implies that it is safe to share among many
threads.
The name Sync may invoke conceptions of "synchronized" from languages such as
Java where locks are used, rather than meaning "safe to access in a shared
fashion across tasks".
As any bikeshed, there are a number of other names which could be possible for this trait:
ConcurrentSynchronizedThreadsafeParallelThreadedAtomicDataRaceFreeConcurrentlySharable
None.