The x509-cert crate currently has a hard dependency on alloc, but several types still have a lifetime which borrows from the input, which precludes one-pass decoding from PEM (where Base64 is decoded directly into owned types) and makes writing things like certificate builders harder.
We could potentially move entirely to types which own their backing data, eliminating lifetimes from all types. We could still potentially have a corresponding set of borrowed e.g. Ref types (see #689), but using owned types would make usage more convenient at the cost of losing zero-copy decoding from DER bytes.
The
x509-certcrate currently has a hard dependency onalloc, but several types still have a lifetime which borrows from the input, which precludes one-pass decoding from PEM (where Base64 is decoded directly into owned types) and makes writing things like certificate builders harder.We could potentially move entirely to types which own their backing data, eliminating lifetimes from all types. We could still potentially have a corresponding set of borrowed e.g.
Reftypes (see #689), but using owned types would make usage more convenient at the cost of losing zero-copy decoding from DER bytes.