Raw lifetimes

Summary

• 'r#ident_or_keyword is now allowed as a lifetime, which allows using keywords such as 'r#fn.

Details

Raw lifetimes are introduced in the 2021 edition to support the ability to migrate to newer editions that introduce new keywords. This is analogous to raw identifiers which provide the same functionality for identifiers. For example, the 2024 edition introduced the gen keyword. Since lifetimes cannot be keywords, this would cause code that use a lifetime 'gen to fail to compile. Raw lifetimes allow the migration lint to modify those lifetimes to 'r#gen which do allow keywords.

In editions prior to 2021, raw lifetimes are parsed as separate tokens. For example 'r#foo is parsed as three tokens: 'r, #, and foo.

Migration

As a part of the 2021 edition a migration lint, rust_2021_prefixes_incompatible_syntax, has been added in order to aid in automatic migration of Rust 2018 codebases to Rust 2021.

In order to migrate your code to be Rust 2021 Edition compatible, run:

cargo fix --edition

Should you want or need to manually migrate your code, migration is fairly straight-forward.

Let's say you have a macro that is defined like so:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
macro_rules! my_macro {
    ($a:tt $b:tt $c:tt) => {};
}
}

In Rust 2015 and 2018 it's legal for this macro to be called like so with no space between the tokens:

my_macro!('r#foo);

In the 2021 edition, this is now parsed as a single token. In order to call this macro, you must add a space before the identifier like so:

my_macro!('r# foo);