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Rust’s “Beyond the &” effort aims to make smart pointers more flexible

lwn.net 12 min read Editor score 7/10

Rust’s language team is working on a design that would let user-defined smart pointers support operations currently available only to built-in references. The proposed mental model could affect future Rust APIs and library design.

What

- Rust’s “Beyond the &” effort aims to make user-defined smart pointers as flexible as built-in references.

How

- A `MutexGuard` can obscure that accesses to separate fields are disjoint, so the borrow checker rejects code that works with a direct mutable reference.

Why it matters

- This matters for concurrent Rust systems: pointer and borrowing rules affect whether shared-state code can be expressed safely.

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