[kevincox]

For sure. The solution has downsides but it does largely solve the problem. It isn't strictly better than go, but it is an important difference.

Mostly off-topic but FWIW "mutable reference into an array" is typically very easy in Rust you just accept a &mut [T]. This also nicely enforces that you don't try to append because that would be wrong 99% of the time.

[klodolph]

> Mostly off-topic but FWIW "mutable reference into an array" is typically very easy in Rust you just accept a &mut [T].

I had specifically worded it as "a couple mutable references into an array". How do I take a small number of references into an array, say two or three?

[steveklabnik]

Off the top of my head you do something like https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

Yeah you gotta write it out per number of times. Luckily this rarely comes up in this specific form.

[klodolph]

Wow, that code is as bad as I thought it would be. Yeesh.

> Luckily this rarely comes up in this specific form.

Well, yeah—it would come up rarely because it only solves the problem under very specific circumstances!

[steveklabnik]

Yeah I mean you might be able to make it better, this is just what I would reach for first.

It is so rare that I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in any rust codebase I’ve ever looked at.

[kevincox]

Ah, missed that. You are right, in that case you need to start making some decisions depending on the situation.