Coroutines, Self-Referential Structs, and Pinning

In this chapter, we’ll start by improving our coroutines by adding the ability to store variables across state changes. We’ll see how this leads to our coroutines needing to take references to themselves and the issues that arise as a result of that. The reason for dedicating a whole chapter to this topic is that it’s an integral part of getting async/await to work in Rust, and also a topic that is somewhat difficult to get a good understanding of.

The reason for this is that the whole concept of pinning is foreign to many developers and just like the Rust ownership system, it takes some time to get a good and working mental model of it.

Fortunately, the concept of pinning is not that difficult to understand, but how it’s implemented in the language and how it interacts with Rust’s type system is abstract and hard to grasp.

While we won’t cover absolutely everything about pinning in...