# Understanding Box

**URL:** <https://users.rust-lang.org/t/understanding-box/106875>\
**Category:** help\
**Created:** [February 16, 2024, 2:26am UTC](https://users.rust-lang.org/t/understanding-box/106875 "2024-02-16T02:26:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 12

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**Author:** ![kentborg](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/users.rust-lang.org/kentborg/32/38569_2.png) [@kentborg](https://users.rust-lang.org/u/kentborg)\
**Post date:** [February 16, 2024, 3:18am UTC](https://users.rust-lang.org/t/understanding-box/106875/12 "2024-02-16T03:18:58Z")

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Hmmm.

So though `Box` doesn't solve any shared ownership problems but that doesn't mean it isn't useful in purely heap-based circumstances. And there its feature of a little-ish fixed sized pointer to arbitrary sized data is useful. And, being a smart pointer that might point to different kinds of things, makes very interesting data structures possible.

My imagined interesting data structure might be owned by a single thread, or it might have a single big mutex policing multiple access.

I think I need to look more at what I've dismissed as "recursive data structures".

_Very_ interesting posts here, thanks to all. I need to sleep on it, and reread this thread tomorrow.

Thanks again,

-kb

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