rust/vec-deref.md
2015-07-06 18:36:16 -07:00

41 lines
1.1 KiB
Markdown

% Deref
Alright! We've got a decent minimal ArrayStack implemented. We can push, we can
pop, and we can clean up after ourselves. However there's a whole mess of functionality
we'd reasonably want. In particular, we have a proper array, but none of the slice
functionality. That's actually pretty easy to solve: we can implement `Deref<Target=[T]>`.
This will magically make our Vec coerce to and behave like a slice in all sorts of
conditions.
All we need is `slice::from_raw_parts`.
```rust
use std::ops::Deref;
impl<T> Deref for Vec<T> {
type Target = [T];
fn deref(&self) -> &[T] {
unsafe {
::std::slice::from_raw_parts(*self.ptr, self.len)
}
}
}
```
And let's do DerefMut too:
```rust
use std::ops::DerefMut;
impl<T> DerefMut for Vec<T> {
fn deref_mut(&mut self) -> &mut [T] {
unsafe {
::std::slice::from_raw_parts_mut(*self.ptr, self.len)
}
}
}
```
Now we have `len`, `first`, `last`, indexing, slicing, sorting, `iter`, `iter_mut`,
and all other sorts of bells and whistles provided by slice. Sweet!