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by charlieflowers
4155 days ago
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> References and lifetimes allow you to safely return pointers to stack allocated objects. In C++, you'd have to do this:
MyType value;
my_function(&value);
When returning references, rust uses the lifetimes instead of explicit declarations to figure out where (on the stack) `value` needs to be allocated. OMG, thank you for including this. I spent several months reading every bit of documentation that was available for Rust, and programming in it daily. Made some good progress. But I never, never came across this explanation. Very enlightening. Rust desperately needs documentation covering these kinds of details. How on earth is someone supposed to make serious use of the language without knowing this? I believe the Klabnik documentation hinted at this (something like, "The Rust compiler is smarter than that" and therefore you don't need to overuse pointers), but by no means did it actually spell it out. And you only needed a few sentences to cover it. I know the Rust community is aware that more documentation is needed and has a todo list a mile long. But I don't know if technical details such as this are high enough on the priority list. |
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There are actual features which still have no documentation. It's hard being a single person trying to keep up with changes from tons of other people, many full time and some community. I may be the person who is most looking forward to Rust being stable...