• Ephera@lemmy.ml
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    11 days ago

    I mean, Rust has the additional thing that a reference is a pointer + a borrow, so it’s not quite as similar to a pass-by-value.

    And as for the dereference operator, occasionally you can use it to turn a reference into an owned value, often by making a copy of the value (but in that case, you can usually also use .to_owned()).

    A case where I don’t think there’s an alternative to the dereference operator, is if you’ve got a mutable reference and you want to replace the value that’s underneath: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=04621490e1d0fd6fe1af7f2e843547fb
    At the very least, if you remove the asterisk, the compiler will tell you very precisely that you need to add it back.