[nick__m]

Thank you for that link, it exactly describes my experience and the rational behind my opinion:

  The Deref trait is designed for the implementation of custom pointer types. The intention is that it will take a pointer-to-T to a T, not convert between different types. It is a shame that this isn’t (probably cannot be) enforced by the trait definition.

  Rust tries to strike a careful balance between explicit and implicit mechanisms, favouring explicit conversions between types. Automatic dereferencing in the dot operator is a case where the ergonomics strongly favour an implicit mechanism, but the intention is that this is limited to degrees of indirection, not conversion between arbitrary types.

[nsteel]

Given that `Interface` is "A wrapper around a string that is guaranteed to be a valid D-Bus interface name", it's not surprising that derefering it would provide the underlying `String`. And then it's “deref-coerced” for you into &str. &str and &String are different types but it's not a conversion between arbitrary types. It's definitely not magic. Personally, I think it is reasonable and quite helpful. It would be a shame if this was the whole reason you gave up on Rust 5 years ago, I hope it wasn't!

[nick__m]

That and the always changing crates required since the std lib was anemic and the stupidily long compilation time.

But I must admit that Cargo and clippy were nice and lifetime are easier to understand than when using std::move in c++ is required vs when it's implicit.

But really what made me abandon learning Rust is Nim. My first Nim program I made a small maze game in about 200 lines.

Also the fact that I now mostly program recreationally since I pivoted from software development to infrastructure ( my title is system analyst) at a research University (absolute job security is really nice). Software development at that institution was getting to political to my taste and I like to play with nice hardware!