ndarray
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Add lifetime-preserving version of iterators
Currently, ArrayView has a helpful lifetime-preserving methods like to_slice, but no way to preserve lifetimes of iterators like axis_iter, outer_iter and such.
This makes it difficult to return iterables from helper functions like this:
fn lazy_process(&self) -> impl '_ + Serialize {
IterSerialize(self.data.outer_iter().map(move |column| {
IterSerialize(column.outer_iter().map(|pixel| pixel.to_slice().unwrap())) // <-- cannot return value referencing function parameter `column`
}))
}
I suggest there should be overrides like into_outer_iter, into_axis_iter etc. on ArrayView that would return iterators tied by the lifetime to the original data instead of the ArrayView itself.
Note: while looking for open issues, the only relevant I found was https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray/issues/320, but there the author could afford to just reshape / flatten the data; that might not always be possible, like in my example above. @bluss mentioned issues and suggestions similar to what I'm describing here though: https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray/issues/320#issuecomment-306875751
For the example above for now found a workaround like this but it's pretty ugly compared to what it could be:
IterSerialize(
(0..self.data.len_of(ndarray::Axis(0))).map(move |column_i| {
IterSerialize((0..self.data.len_of(ndarray::Axis(1))).map(move |row_i| {
self.data
.slice(ndarray::s![column_i, row_i, ..])
.to_slice()
.unwrap()
}))
}),
)