Rust for Professionals

Re:Rust for Professionals by legerdemain on Tuesday January 03, 2023 @01:50AM (#34228602)

I've posted similar minimal examples before. The first one triggers a move (and then fails to compile), while the second one triggers a reborrow. Sure, you can explicitly write out every instance of reborrowing with `&mut *`. That would require you to understand every instance that triggers it, and would also be unbelievably noisy, since automatic dereferencing and automatic reborrowing are actually incredibly common.

  > pub fn main() {
  >     let mut x = String::from("moo");
  >     let y = &mut x;
  >     let z = y;
  >     println!("{:?}", y)
  > }
  > 
  > pub fn main() {
  >     let mut x = String::from("moo");
  >     let y = &mut x;
  >     let z: &mut _ = y;
  >     println!("{:?}", y)
  > }

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Re:Rust for Professionals by scotty79 on Tuesday January 03, 2023 @09:47AM (#34231987)

Ok. So that's just triggering auto-insertion of &mut *

It's completely optional fearure. You don't have to rely on it. Like auto-insertion of semicolons in JS maybe it's better if you don't. Although likelihood of this biting you is way lower than in case of relying on semicolons autoinsertion.

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Re:Rust for Professionals by legerdemain on Tuesday January 03, 2023 @04:47PM (#34238563)

It's "completely optional" in the sense that in several years of reading other people's Rust code, I have never seen anyone explicitly use it throughout a code base. It is utterly ubiquitous, rarely explained, and poorly (if at all) understood by a large majority of Rust users I've mentioned it to.

My claim is that for most Rust users, understanding the borrow checker is limited to a few heuristics that seem to work for them 80% of the time, and throwing up their hands and declaring an approach unworkable the remaining 20% of the time. To a first approximation, no one can mentally model the borrow checker beyond extremely simple examples of 4-5 lines of code.

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