struct App<Config> {
    config: Config
}

Enter The Any Type

A solution for this issue comes in the form of the Any type. It lets you take a 'static type and box it up as a dyn Any so you can do something with it later. That later is for instance can involve a downcast to the original type. This means you can store arbitrary types somewhere (like on our App object) and retrieve them later.

So we basically want something like the following API wise:

let app = App::new();

// place in extension map
app.extensions().insert(MyConfig { ... });
app.extensions().insert(MyDatabase { ... });

// retrieve from extension map
let config = app.extensions().get::<Config>();

So we basically want a type which can hold such extensions so we can use it later. For now let's look at the most simplest of these options: an Extensions object which lets you retrieve extensions and insert new ones. If an extension does not exist yet, instead of panicking we will automatically upsert it (eg: the type needs to implement Default):

use std::collections::HashMap;
use std::any::{Any, TypeId};

#[derive(Default)]
pub struct Extensions {
    map: HashMap<TypeId, Box<dyn Any>>,
}

impl Extensions {
    pub fn insert<T: 'static>(&mut self, value: T) {
        self.map.insert(TypeId::of::<T>(), Box::new(value));
    }

    pub fn get<T: Default + 'static>(&self) -> &T {
        self.ensure::<T>();
        self.map.get(&TypeId::of::<T>())
            .and_then(|b| b.downcast_ref())
            .unwrap()
    }

    pub fn get_mut<T: Default + 'static>(&mut self) -> &mut T {
        self.ensure::<T>();
        self.map.get_mut(&TypeId::of::<T>())
            .and_then(|b| b.downcast_mut())
            .unwrap()
    }

    fn ensure<T: Default + 'static>(&self) {
        if self.map.get(&TypeId::of::<T>()).is_none() {
            self.insert(T::default());
        }
    }
}

So this is pretty straightforward to use now but leaves one issue behind: the borrow checker will make your life quite hard. The above map is quite useful for the typical setup where you have an object like an application, you configure it once, and from then on the extension map is frozen as there are too many shared references to it flying around that nobody will ever be able to get a &mut reference to it any more.

So how does this work? Basically each rust type has a type ID which you can retrieve with TypeId::of::<T>(). It's a unique value that you can use for comparisons or as a key in a map which is what we're doing here. Of each type one value is permitted. We then store this in the map as dyn Any which lets us use the downcast_ref and downcast_mut method to case the value back to what we had originally. We know that these casts won't fail in our case so we can safely unwrap() them.

But what if you need to have some sort of interior mutability?

Interior Mutability Extension Map

Let's look at a common case of a web framework or template engine. Take the MiniJinja template engine for instance. It has a State object which is created once per template initialization, is not Send or Sync and holds state the engine needs for the evaluation. What if you want to make it possible for a user to put their own state on it? In that case one can adapt the type from above by using RefCell internally:

use std::collections::HashMap;
use std::any::{Any, TypeId};
use std::cell::{Ref, RefCell, RefMut};

#[derive(Default)]
pub struct Extensions {
    map: RefCell<HashMap<TypeId, Box<dyn Any>>>,
}

impl Extensions {
    pub fn insert<T: 'static>(&self, value: T) {
        self.map.borrow_mut().insert(TypeId::of::<T>(), Box::new(value));
    }

    pub fn get<T: Default + 'static>(&self) -> Ref<'_, T> {
        self.ensure::<T>();
        Ref::map(self.map.borrow(), |m| {
            m.get(&TypeId::of::<T>())
                .and_then(|b| b.downcast_ref())
                .unwrap()
        })
    }

    pub fn get_mut<T: Default + 'static>(&self) -> RefMut<'_, T> {
        self.ensure::<T>();
        RefMut::map(self.map.borrow_mut(), |m| {
            m.get_mut(&TypeId::of::<T>())
                .and_then(|b| b.downcast_mut())
                .unwrap()
        })
    }

    fn ensure<T: Default + 'static>(&self) {
        if self.map.borrow().get(&TypeId::of::<T>()).is_none() {
            self.insert(T::default());
        }
    }
}

From the end user's perspective not much has changed. The main difference is now that yo can call get_mut even if you do not have a mutable reference to the extension map. This feat is accomplished by RefCell having the ability to move the necessary checks to runtime. When a RefMut is given out Rust will panic if there are any shared loans out or already another mutable reference. For the users here this is not much of a concern as we can easily ensure that there is only ever one mutable reference in use. What makes RefCell particularly great here is that the Ref and RefMut types have a static map method that lets you derive another Ref or RefMut that holds on to the original loan, but transforms the value.

Going Sync

Alright. But what if we want to do the same trick as above but with Send and Sync? Well in that case we need a locking type. Sadly the Mutex or RwLock from the standard library does not provide a way to hold on to the loan and map it, so we need to use something else. You can use the parking_lot crate instead which provides the necessary functionality:

use parking_lot::{
    MappedRwLockReadGuard,
    MappedRwLockWriteGuard,
    RwLock,
    RwLockReadGuard,
    RwLockWriteGuard,
};
use std::any::{Any, TypeId};
use std::collections::HashMap;

#[derive(Default)]
pub struct Extensions {
    map: RwLock<HashMap<TypeId, Box<dyn Any>>>,
}

impl Extensions {
    pub fn insert<T: 'static>(&self, value: T) {
        self.map.write().insert(TypeId::of::<T>(), Box::new(value));
    }

    pub fn get<T: Default + 'static>(&self) -> MappedRwLockReadGuard<'_, T> {
        self.ensure::<T>();
        RwLockReadGuard::map(self.map.read(), |m| {
            m.get(&TypeId::of::<T>())
                .and_then(|b| b.downcast_ref())
                .unwrap()
        })
    }

    pub fn get_mut<T: Default + 'static>(&self) -> MappedRwLockWriteGuard<'_, T> {
        self.ensure::<T>();
        RwLockWriteGuard::map(self.map.write(), |m| {
            m.get_mut(&TypeId::of::<T>())
                .and_then(|b| b.downcast_mut())
                .unwrap()
        })
    }

    fn ensure<T: Default + 'static>(&self) {
        if self.map.read().get(&TypeId::of::<T>()).is_none() {
            self.insert(T::default());
        }
    }
}

Happy extending!