rust•armanazi•smartpointer•deref•coercion
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
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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.
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