Rust reference assignment

help
1

Hello,
I'm very new to Rust and I have some doubts about assigning a value to a mutable references,
Is there a way to assign a value to something like a &mut var without having to dereference var (*var = ...).
I've made a small code to illustrate my problem: Rust Playground

Basically, I want to point to something inside a vector and expose, to the API user, a struct that looks like a normal struct and not a reference. In other languages you would override the assignment operator, but in Rust there is no such thing (as far as I can tell), I wonder if there is some other language feature that achieve something similar.

2

You are right. There is no such thing in Rust.

For normal methods, autoderef takes care of it, but you can't override assignment.

2 Likes
3

There is no way to change the behavior of x.y = in rust.

Just to let you know, though, there is a safe way to do what you're doing in to_tuple and to_struct: [_]::split_at_mut

Your code, without manual unsafe: Rust Playground

1 Like
4

That is much better, thanks. It also gives the exact same instructions as the unsafe approach.