Rust's unsafe pointer types need an overhaul

Re:Rust's unsafe pointer types need an overhaul by nickitolas on Sunday March 20, 2022 @04:56AM (#30741179)

I think the familiarity might be a double edged sword, since AIUI the proposed operator has different semantics. "ptr~field~field2" is not "ptr->field->field2", it's more like "&(&ptr->field)->field2". Therefore I feel like the familiarity might just confuse people or give them a false sense of security.

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Re:Rust's unsafe pointer types need an overhaul by xorvoid on Sunday March 20, 2022 @07:09AM (#30741684)

Meh. It’s harmless. You get a helpful compiler error the first time and you very quickly learn. I’ve been a C programmer for >20 years and this slight difference wouldn’t bother me.

Explaining it is simple:

‘.’ uses a reference and produces a reference

‘->’ uses a pointer and produces a pointer

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Re:Rust's unsafe pointer types need an overhaul by heinrich5991 on Sunday March 20, 2022 @09:50AM (#30742572)

`.` only produces a reference if you explicitly reference the result.

`a.b` is of type `B`, only `&a.b` is `&B` and `&mut a.b` is `&mut B`. This is unlike your proposal of `->` where `a->b` would be `*const B`.

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Re:Rust's unsafe pointer types need an overhaul by estebank on Sunday March 20, 2022 @03:55PM (#30746025)

The problem is not ibvalid.code being rejected with an error, but rather code that is accepted but does something unexpected. Lints can help with that, but that has many limits.

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