Understanding and relationship between Box, ref, & and *

Question

I'm a bit confused about how pointers work in Rust. There's ref, Box, &, *, and I'm not sure how they work together.

Here's how I understand it currently:

1. Box isn't really a pointer - it's a way to allocate data on the heap, and pass around unsized types (traits especially) in function arguments.

2. ref is used in pattern matching to borrow something that you match on, instead of taking it. For example,

   let thing: Option<i32> = Some(4);
   match thing {
       None => println!("none!"),
       Some(ref x) => println!("{}", x), // x is a borrowed thing
   }
   println!("{}", x + 1); // wouldn't work without the ref since the block would have taken ownership of the data
   

3. & is used to make a borrow (borrowed pointer). If I have a function fn foo(&self) then I'm taking a reference to myself that will expire after the function terminates, leaving the caller's data alone. I can also pass data that I want to retain ownership of by doing bar(&mydata).

4. * is used to make a raw pointer: for example, let y: i32 = 4; let x = &y as *const i32. I understand pointers in C/C++ but I'm not sure how this works with Rust's type system, and how they can be safely used. I'm also not sure what the use cases are for this type of pointer. Additionally, the * symbol can be used to dereference things (what things, and why?).

Could someone explain the 4th type of pointer to me, and verify that my understanding of the other types is correct? I'd also appreciate anyone pointing out any common use cases that I haven't mentioned.

Answer 1

First of all, all of the items you listed are really different things, even if they are related to pointers. Box is a library-defined smart pointer type; ref is a syntax for pattern matching; & is a reference operator, doubling as a sigil in reference types; * is a dereference operator, doubling as a sigil in raw pointer types. See below for more explanation.

There are four basic pointer types in Rust which can be divided in two groups - references and raw pointers:

&T        - immutable (shared) reference
&mut T    - mutable (exclusive) reference

*const T  - immutable raw pointer
*mut T    - mutable raw pointer

The difference between the last two is very thin, because either can be cast to another without any restrictions, so const/mut distinction there serves mostly as a lint. Raw pointers can be created freely to anything, and they also can be created out of thin air from integers, for example.

Naturally, this is not so for references - reference types and their interaction define one of the key feature of Rust: borrowing. References have a lot of restrictions on how and when they could be created, how they could be used and how they interact with each other. In return, they can be used without unsafe blocks. What borrowing is exactly and how it works is out of scope of this answer, though.

Both references and raw pointers can be created using & operator:

let x: u32 = 12;

let ref1: &u32 = &x;
let raw1: *const u32 = &x;

let ref2: &mut u32 = &mut x;
let raw2: *mut u32 = &mut x;

Both references and raw pointers can be dereferenced using * operator, though for raw pointers it requires an unsafe block:

*ref1; *ref2;

unsafe { *raw1; *raw2; }

The dereference operator is often omitted, because another operator, the "dot" operator (i.e., .), automatically references or dereferences its left argument. So, for example, if we have these definitions:

struct X { n: u32 };

impl X {
    fn method(&self) -> u32 { self.n }
}

then, despite that method() takes self by reference, self.n automatically dereferences it, so you won't have to type (*self).n. Similar thing happens when method() is called:

let x = X { n: 12 };
let n = x.method();

Here, the compiler automatically references x in x.method(), so you won't have to write (&x).method().

The next to last piece of code also demonstrated the special &self syntax. It means just self: &Self, or, more specifically, self: &X in this example. &mut self, *const self, *mut self also work.

So, references are the main pointer kind in Rust and should be used almost always. Raw pointers, which don't have restrictions of references, should be used in low-level code implementing high-level abstractions (collections, smart pointers, etc.) and in FFI (interacting with C libraries).

Rust also has dynamically-sized (or unsized) types. These types do not have a definite statically-known size and therefore can only be used through a pointer/reference. However, only a pointer is not enough - additional information is needed, for example, length for slices or a pointer to a virtual methods table for trait objects. This information is "embedded" in pointers to unsized types, making these pointers "fat".

A fat pointer is basically a structure which contains the actual pointer to the piece of data and some additional information (length for slices, pointer to vtable for trait objects). What's important here is that Rust handles these details about pointer contents absolutely transparently for the user - if you pass &[u32] or *mut SomeTrait values around, corresponding internal information will be automatically passed along.

Box<T> is one of the smart pointers in the Rust standard library. It provides a way to allocate enough memory on the heap to store a value of the corresponding type, and then it serves as a handle, a pointer to that memory. Box<T> owns the data it points to; when it is dropped, the corresponding piece of memory on the heap is deallocated.

A very useful way to think of boxes is to consider them as regular values, but with a fixed size. That is, Box<T> is equivalent to just T, except it always takes a number of bytes which correspond to the pointer size of your machine. We say that (owned) boxes provide value semantics. Internally, they are implemented using raw pointers, like almost any other high-level abstraction.

Boxes (in fact, this is true for almost all of the other smart pointers, like Rc) can also be borrowed: you can get a &T out of Box<T>. This can happen automatically with the . operator or you can do it explicitly by dereferencing and referencing it again:

let x: Box<u32> = Box::new(12);
let y: &u32 = &*x;

In this regard, Boxes are similar to built-in pointers - you can use dereference operator to reach their contents. This is possible because the dereference operator in Rust is overloadable, and it is overloaded for most (if not all) of the smart pointer types. This allows easy borrowing of these pointers contents.

And, finally, ref is just a syntax in patterns to obtain a variable of the reference type instead of a value. For example:

let x: u32 = 12;

let y = x;           // y: u32, a copy of x
let ref z = x;       // z: &u32, points to x
let ref mut zz = x;  // zz: &mut u32, points to x

While the above example can be rewritten with reference operators:

let z = &x;
let zz = &mut x;

(which would also make it more idiomatic), there are cases when refs are indispensable, for example, when taking references into enum variants:

let x: Option<Vec<u32>> = ...;

match x {
    Some(ref v) => ...
    None => ...
}

In the above example, x is only borrowed inside the whole match statement, which allows using x after this match. If we write it as such:

match x {
    Some(v) => ...
    None => ...
}

then x will be consumed by this match and will become unusable after it.