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armanriazi•rust•smartpointer•deref•coercion

ArmanRiazi answered on March 24, 2022 Popularity 1/10 Helpfulness 1/10

answer armanriazi•rust•smartpointer•deref•coercion

armanriazi•rust•smartpointer•deref•coercion

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Deref coercion is a convenience that Rust performs on arguments to functions and methods. Deref coercion works only on types that implement the Deref trait. Deref coercion converts such a type into a reference to another type. For example, deref coercion can convert &String to &str because String implements the Deref trait such that it returns &str. 
The number of times that Deref::deref needs to be inserted is resolved at compile time, so there is no runtime penalty for taking advantage of deref coercion!
Similar to how you use the Deref trait to override the * operator on immutable references, you can use the DerefMut trait to override the * operator on mutable references.

Rust does deref coercion when it finds types and trait implementations in three cases:

From &T to &U when T: Deref<Target=U>
From &mut T to &mut U when T: DerefMut<Target=U>
3)From &mut T to &U when T: Deref<Target=U>
3)The third case is trickier: Rust will also coerce a mutable reference to an immutable one. But the reverse is not possible

{
the Drop trait is almost always used when implementing a smart pointer. For example, when a Box<T> is dropped it will deallocate the space on the heap that the box points to.
 Note that we didn’t need to call the drop method explicitly.
}
{
e.g
We call the as_ref method on the Option because we want a reference to the value inside the Option rather than ownership of the value. Because state is an Option<Box<dyn State>>
  impl Post {
    // --snip--
    pub fn content(&self) -> &str {
        self.state.as_ref().unwrap().content(self)
    }
    // --snip--
}At this point, when we call content on the &Box<dyn State>, deref coercion will take effect on the & and the Box so the content method will ultimately be called on the type that implements the State trait.
}

Popularity 1/10 Helpfulness 1/10 Language rust

Source: github.com

Tags: rust

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Contributed on Mar 24 2022

ArmanRiazi

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armanriazi•rust•smartpointer•deref•coercion

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