Rust's language team wants smart pointers to behave like built-in references
Beyond the &
At RustConf 2026, language team lead Tyler Mandry presented "Beyond the &," a design that exposes the compiler's internal concept of a "place" to library authors. By implementing new traits like BorrowPlace and ProjectPlace on a handle type, custom smart pointers such as MutexGuard could gain the same flexibility as built-in references, letting the borrow checker reason about disjoint fields and eliminating awkward reborrow workarounds. The design is still a prototype, and the team is soliciting real-world examples.
My hope is that it will let libraries make Rust even more powerful and friendly.
- NooneAtAll3
I don't understand, how is this connected to Linux?
Why is it on linux news blog?
- weinzierl
"A place is Rust's equivalent of C's left-hand sides (lvalues): a location that values can be read from or written to. The difference between a place and a pointer is that a place is an abstract expression that exists at compile time, such as state.cache, and a pointer is one way to represent a place at run time."
That was a helpful bit.
- chombier
Recording of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXs56902ElY