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`HeaderName` implements `Borrow<str>` but doesn't hash like `str`

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#824 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
62/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust
Domain
api

Research direction

Start at HeaderName's Borrow and Hash implementations, using the issue's hash_one example to understand the mismatch and the stdlib Borrow documentation for the required guarantees. Decide whether hashing should match as_str() or Borrow should be removed, then verify that hashing HeaderName and its borrowed string agrees and that hashmap lookup behaves correctly.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Issue

HeaderName implements Borrow<str>, but it's Hash implementation can give different results compared to hashing the string we receive from calling borrow() on it.

Example :

let build_hasher = BuildHasherDefault::<DefaultHasher>::default();

let accept_charset = http::header::ACCEPT_CHARSET;
let borrowed: &str = accept_charset.borrow();
assert!(borrowed == "accept-charset");
assert!(build_hasher.hash_one(borrowed) != build_hasher.hash_one(accept_charset));

This is unexpected, as the stdlib documentation for Borrow says

In particular Eq, Ord and Hash must be equivalent for borrowed and owned values

This causes issues if you put a HeaderName as the key of a "normal" hashmap, because indexing by &str will compile, but be a bug since the hash don't match.

Potential fix

Either:

  • add a custom Hash implementation for HeaderName that hashes to the str value of the header
impl Hash for HeaderName {
    fn hash<H: Hasher>(&self, state: &mut H) {
        self.as_str().hash(state);
    }
}
  • remove the Borrow trait implementation. As mentioned in the stdlib documentation, AsRef is sufficient if the guarantees that Borrow should gives cannot be respected. Of course that would be a breaking change...
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
1.4k
Forks
378
Avg merge
1d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
5

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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