At the moment, as #1088 notes (and also #1085), it's difficult to expose things like iterators to Python because of the restriction that #[pyclass] cannot take a lifetime.

This restriction obviously makes sense because Rust-managed data cannot be borrowed and then exposed to Python; Python will allow this data to live arbitrarily long.

However, data that's already owned by Python, e.g. in a PyCell<T>, can be safely "borrowed" and stored in another #[pyclass]. We do this already, but only for the lifetime-free case Py<T>.

It would be incredibly powerful if PyRef<'a, T> (or some similar construct) was able to be stored inside another #[pyclass]. This would make make wrapping arbitrary iterators, for example, much easier.

This playground shows that with some carefully-placed transmutes it's possible to hack the type system to at least achieve the desired affect: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2018&gist=041f9a6f5dfa3a5fc59ece7105cc4dfd

That code is a wildly unsafe sketch that doesn't actually use the PyO3 types, so please don't try to use it as-is. You're responsible for all segfaults if you do 😄. If you're finding yourself in need of this feature, I can offer mentoring to help design how PyO3 could make such a trick safe and ergonomic.