How to return a reference to a sub-value of a value that is under a mutex?

The parking_lot crate provides an implementation of Mutexes that’s better on many accounts than the one in std. Among the goodies is MutexGuard::map, which implements an interface similar to owning_ref‘s.

use std::sync::Arc;
use parking_lot::{Mutex, MutexGuard, MappedMutexGuard};
use std::collections::HashMap;

pub struct MyStruct {
    data: Arc<Mutex<HashMap<i32, Vec<i32>>>>,
}

impl MyStruct {
    pub fn get_data_for(&self, i: &i32) -> MappedMutexGuard<Vec<i32>> {
        MutexGuard::map(self.data.lock(), |d| d.get_mut(i).unwrap())
    }
}

You can try it on the playground here.