Zero-Copy Pages in Rust: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Lifetimes
Summary
This article presents a deep dive into zero-copy techniques in Rust for database engines, detailing how to minimize CPU copies by bypassing the OS page cache with O_DIRECT and by using borrowed views over pinned bytes. It introduces a read/write path architecture built around PageReadGuard, PageWriteGuard, HeapPage, and HeapPageView, and discusses lifetime variance and the ergonomic trade-offs of safe abstractions.