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Borrowing and lifetimes implementing async functions in Rust using Actix-web

👀 Views: 103 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-08
rust actix-web async lifetimes borrowing Rust

I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. I'm currently working on a web service using Actix-web (version 4.0) and I'm struggling with Rust's borrowing and lifetimes in async functions. I'm trying to create a handler that fetches data from a database and returns it as JSON. However, I keep running into a compiler behavior about lifetimes, specifically: ``` behavior[E0505]: want to move out of borrowed content ``` Here's a simplified version of my handler code: ```rust use actix_web::{web, HttpResponse, Responder}; use serde_json::json; struct AppState { data: Vec<String>, } async fn get_data(state: web::Data<AppState>) -> impl Responder { let response_data = &state.data; // Borrowing the data let json_response = json!({ "data": response_data }); HttpResponse::Ok().json(json_response) } ``` The behavior occurs at the point where I try to create the JSON response. I've tried changing the `response_data` declaration to return a reference, but that leads to lifetime issues since the closure needs to return an owned value. I've also considered using `.clone()` on `state.data` to avoid the move behavior, but I'm concerned about the performance implications of cloning a potentially large vector every time this handler is called. Is there a more idiomatic way to return this data without running into ownership issues? Also, how can I ensure that I'm handling the lifetimes correctly in an async context? Any tips on best practices for managing state in Actix-web would be greatly appreciated. I'm working on a CLI tool that needs to handle this. How would you solve this?