Beyond the &: A Future for Native Smart Pointers in Rust
Talkat RustConf 2026 · on Thursday, 2026-09-10· at 15:45· Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Palais des Congrès de Montréal·
summary
Proposal implements compiler-constructed handles for place expressions and new handle traits (e.g. project_place, borrow_place) so library pointers can project into fields, participate in pattern matching, and let MutexGuard behave like built-in refs without round‑tripping through raw pointers. Prototype compiles, turns multi-step unsafe field-offset boilerplate into single borrows, and composes across pointer types and wrappers (MaybeUninit, Pin). Work relies on a nightly DREF-stable shortcut and still needs improved diagnostics and exact stability semantics.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:49Rust pointer types
- 5:21Accidental complexity
- 8:57Beyond the ampersand
- 13:14Introducing handles
- 20:26Simpler mutex guard
- 21:28Pattern matching
- 24:19Place wrappers
- 25:46Flattening pointer tiers
- 27:11Call for collaboration
- 28:55Closing and Q&A
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