Visibility of trait implementation

help
1

Is it possible to restrict the visibility of a trait implementation?
For example, if I implement DerefMut or IndexMut on a public type, can I keep the implementations private to the crate?

2 Likes
2

The visibility of a trait implementation is the intersection of the visibility of the trait and the visibility of the type it's implemented on.

3

You can't do exactly that; as @jethrogb says, since the type is public, and DerefMut is public, the impl will be visible. However, you could make the public type a "newtype" of a private type that implements DerefMut and IndexMut:

mod my_module {
    pub struct PublicType(PrivateType);
    struct PrivateType { ... actual stuff ... }
    impl DerefMut for PrivateType { ... }
    ...
}

Since PrivateType isn't pub, and the sole element of PublicType isn't pub, there's no way for code outside my_module to get at a PrivateType instance and use its DerefMut implementation. This comes at the cost of methods on PublicType that simply forward the operation to self.0.

4

Thanks! That's pretty much what I had figured out, but I wanted to be sure.
That's not terribly convenient, it adds yet a little more boilerplate and type and method wrappings. It's a shame that we can control the visibility of the methods but not implement things like IndexMut that can be quite convenient and keep them private.

5

You could add another Deref implementation for PublicType to PrivateType. This will make internal usage more ergonomic.

6

Yeah that's probably as close as I'll get to what I wanted. Thanks :slight_smile: