How cheap is construction?

[ThatXliner]

Should I only have 1 call of arduino_hal::pins! throughout the whole program? What if I want to do stuff on some pins in some functions? How do I pass it around? The Pins struct isn't Copy or Clone, and accessing a pin requires a borrow...

[ThatXliner]

Nevermind, just borrow move the Pin and return it when you're done

[Rahix]

To give some context:

The Pins struct is meant to be a singleton — only one is allowed to exist in your program. It is designed this way because each pin only exists once in hardware. By having only one Pins struct, each Pin also only exists once. So by design, you can't ever perform conflicting operations on the same pin.

You already figured out the right way to work with this: Either borrow or move the pins around as needed. A borrowed pin cannot change mode while a moved pin can be reconfigured by the receiver.