理解 Box、 ref 和 * 之间的关系

我对 Rust 中指针的工作方式有点困惑。有 ref、 Box、 &、 *，我不知道它们是如何协同工作的。

以下是我目前的理解:

  1. Box实际上不是一个指针——它是在堆上分配数据的一种方法，并且在函数参数中传递不大的类型(特别是 trait)。

  2. 在模式匹配中，ABc0是用来借用你所匹配的东西，而不是拿走它,

    let thing: Option<i32> = Some(4);
match thing {
None => println!("none!"),
Some(ref x) => println!("{}", x), // x is a borrowed thing
}
println!("{}", x + 1); // wouldn't work without the ref since the block would have taken ownership of the data

  3. & is used to make a borrow (borrowed pointer). If I have a function fn foo(&self) then I'm taking a reference to myself that will expire after the function terminates, leaving the caller's data alone. I can also pass data that I want to retain ownership of by doing bar(&mydata).

  4. * is used to make a raw pointer: for example, let y: i32 = 4; let x = &y as *const i32. I understand pointers in C/C++ but I'm not sure how this works with Rust's type system, and how they can be safely used. I'm also not sure what the use cases are for this type of pointer. Additionally, the * symbol can be used to dereference things (what things, and why?).

Could someone explain the 4th type of pointer to me, and verify that my understanding of the other types is correct? I'd also appreciate anyone pointing out any common use cases that I haven't mentioned.

20835 次浏览
小开

References and raw pointers are the same thing at the implementation level. The difference from the programmer perspective is that references are safe (in Rust terms), but raw pointers are not.

The borrow checker guarantees that references are always valid (lifetime management), that you can have only one mutable reference at time, etc.

These type of constraint can be too strict for many use cases, so raw pointers (which do not have any constraints, like in C/C++) are useful to implement low-level data structures, and in general low-level stuff. However, you can only dereference raw pointers or do operations on them inside an unsafe block.

The containers in the standard library are implemented using raw pointers, Box and Rc too.

Box and Rc are what smart pointers are in C++, that is wrappers around raw pointers.

小开

Box is logically a newtype around a raw pointer (*const T). However, it allocates and deallocates its data during construction and destruction, so does not have to borrow data from some other source.

The same thing is true of other pointer types, like Rc - a reference counted pointer. These are structs containing private raw pointers which they allocate into and deallocate from.

A raw pointer has exactly the same layout as a a normal pointer, so are not compatible with C pointers in several cases. Importantly, *const str and *const [T] are fat pointers, which means they contain extra information about the value's length.

However, raw pointers makes absolutely no guarantees as to their validity. For example, I can safely do

123 as *const String

This pointer is invalid, since the memory location 123 does not point to a valid String. Thus, when dereferencing one, an unsafe block is required.

Further, whereas borrows are required to respect certain laws - namely that you cannot have multiple borrows if one is mutable - raw pointers do not have to respect this. There are other, weaker, laws that must be obeyed, but you're less likely to run afoul of these.

There is no logical difference between *mut and *const, although they may need to be casted to the other to do certain operations - the difference is documentative.

小开
最佳答案

First of all, all of the items you listed are really different things, even if they are related to pointers. Box is a library-defined smart pointer type; ref is a syntax for pattern matching; & is a reference operator, doubling as a sigil in reference types; * is a dereference operator, doubling as a sigil in raw pointer types. See below for more explanation.

There are four basic pointer types in Rust which can be divided in two groups - references and raw pointers:

&T        - immutable (shared) reference
&mut T    - mutable (exclusive) reference


*const T  - immutable raw pointer
*mut T    - mutable raw pointer

The difference between the last two is very thin, because either can be cast to another without any restrictions, so const/mut distinction there serves mostly as a lint. Raw pointers can be created freely to anything, and they also can be created out of thin air from integers, for example.

Naturally, this is not so for references - reference types and their interaction define one of the key feature of Rust: borrowing. References have a lot of restrictions on how and when they could be created, how they could be used and how they interact with each other. In return, they can be used without unsafe blocks. What borrowing is exactly and how it works is out of scope of this answer, though.

Both references and raw pointers can be created using & operator:

let x: u32 = 12;


let ref1: &u32 = &x;
let raw1: *const u32 = &x;


let ref2: &mut u32 = &mut x;
let raw2: *mut u32 = &mut x;

Both references and raw pointers can be dereferenced using * operator, though for raw pointers it requires an unsafe block:

*ref1; *ref2;


unsafe { *raw1; *raw2; }

The dereference operator is often omitted, because another operator, the "dot" operator (i.e., .), automatically references or dereferences its left argument. So, for example, if we have these definitions:

struct X { n: u32 };


impl X {
fn method(&self) -> u32 { self.n }
}

then, despite that method() takes self by reference, self.n automatically dereferences it, so you won't have to type (*self).n. Similar thing happens when method() is called:

let x = X { n: 12 };
let n = x.method();

Here, the compiler automatically references x in x.method(), so you won't have to write (&x).method().

The next to last piece of code also demonstrated the special &self syntax. It means just self: &Self, or, more specifically, self: &X in this example. &mut self, *const self, *mut self also work.

So, references are the main pointer kind in Rust and should be used almost always. Raw pointers, which don't have restrictions of references, should be used in low-level code implementing high-level abstractions (collections, smart pointers, etc.) and in FFI (interacting with C libraries).

Rust also has dynamically-sized (or unsized) types. These types do not have a definite statically-known size and therefore can only be used through a pointer/reference. However, only a pointer is not enough - additional information is needed, for example, length for slices or a pointer to a virtual methods table for trait objects. This information is "embedded" in pointers to unsized types, making these pointers "fat".

A fat pointer is basically a structure which contains the actual pointer to the piece of data and some additional information (length for slices, pointer to vtable for trait objects). What's important here is that Rust handles these details about pointer contents absolutely transparently for the user - if you pass &[u32] or *mut SomeTrait values around, corresponding internal information will be automatically passed along.

Box<T> is one of the smart pointers in the Rust standard library. It provides a way to allocate enough memory on the heap to store a value of the corresponding type, and then it serves as a handle, a pointer to that memory. Box<T> owns the data it points to; when it is dropped, the corresponding piece of memory on the heap is deallocated.

A very useful way to think of boxes is to consider them as regular values, but with a fixed size. That is, Box<T> is equivalent to just T, except it always takes a number of bytes which correspond to the pointer size of your machine. We say that (owned) boxes provide value semantics. Internally, they are implemented using raw pointers, like almost any other high-level abstraction.

Boxes (in fact, this is true for almost all of the other smart pointers, like Rc) can also be borrowed: you can get a &T out of Box<T>. This can happen automatically with the . operator or you can do it explicitly by dereferencing and referencing it again:

let x: Box<u32> = Box::new(12);
let y: &u32 = &*x;

In this regard, Boxes are similar to built-in pointers - you can use dereference operator to reach their contents. This is possible because the dereference operator in Rust is overloadable, and it is overloaded for most (if not all) of the smart pointer types. This allows easy borrowing of these pointers contents.

And, finally, ref is just a syntax in patterns to obtain a variable of the reference type instead of a value. For example:

let x: u32 = 12;


let y = x;           // y: u32, a copy of x
let ref z = x;       // z: &u32, points to x
let ref mut zz = x;  // zz: &mut u32, points to x

While the above example can be rewritten with reference operators:

let z = &x;
let zz = &mut x;

(which would also make it more idiomatic), there are cases when refs are indispensable, for example, when taking references into enum variants:

let x: Option<Vec<u32>> = ...;


match x {
Some(ref v) => ...
None => ...
}

In the above example, x is only borrowed inside the whole match statement, which allows using x after this match. If we write it as such:

match x {
Some(v) => ...
None => ...
}

then x will be consumed by this match and will become unusable after it.

小开

I would like to add my two cents.

A. Table

Reference/
Pointer		 Data
Location		 Mutable Shared
Ownership		 Safe impl
Copy
&T stack ❌ ✔️️ ✔️ ✔️
&mut T stack ✔️ ❌ ✔️ ❌
*const T stack ❌ ✔️ ❌ ✔️
*mut T stack ✔️ ✔️ ❌ ✔️
Box<T> heap ✔️ ❌ ✔️ ❌
Rc<T> heap ❌ ✔️ ✔️ ❌

B. Comments on table

&T

  • Mutable (❌): Error: cannot assign to *some_ref, which is behind a & reference some_ref is a & reference, so the data it refers to cannot be written rustc (E0594).
  • Shared (✔️)
  • Safe (✔️)
  • impl Copy (✔️)

&mut T

  • Mutable (✔️)
  • Shared (❌): Has only one owner. Error: cannot borrow x as mutable more than once at a time second mutable borrow occurs here rustc (E0499).
  • Safe (✔️)
  • impl Copy (❌): Error: move occurs because some_ref has type &mut u32, which does not implement the Copy trait.

*const T

  • Mutable: (❌): Error: cannot assign to *some_raw_pointer, which is behind a *const pointer raw1 is a *const pointer, so the data it refers to cannot be written rustc (E0594).
  • Shared (✔️)
  • Safe: (❌): Error: dereference of raw pointer is unsafe and requires unsafe function or block raw pointers may be null, dangling or unaligned; they can violate aliasing rules and cause data races: all of these are undefined behavior rustc (E0133).
  • impl Copy (✔️): Please check the official documentation.

*mut T

  • Mutable (✔️)
  • Shared (✔️)
  • Safe (❌): Error: dereference of raw pointer is unsafe and requires unsafe function or block raw pointers may be null, dangling or unaligned; they can violate aliasing rules and cause data races: all of these are undefined behavior rustc (E0133).
  • impl Copy (✔️): Please check the Official Documentation.

Box<T>

  • Mutable (✔️)
  • Shared (❌): In order to prove it, use a reference to a box in some scope, the reference will drop right after that scope ends because it has only one owner. Please refer to this SO answer for more details. Error: some_box does not live long enough borrowed value does not live long enough rustc (E0597).
  • Safe (✔️)
  • impl Copy (❌): Please check the Official Documentation. Actually there is a reason:

You can't implement Copy for Box, that would allow creation of multiple boxes referencing the same thing.

Rc<T>

  • Mutable (❌): Well, only one copy is mutable, and it's a bit more complicated. Error: cannot assign to data in an Rc trait DerefMut is required to modify through a dereference, but it is not implemented for Rc<u32> rustc (E0594).
  • Shared (✔️): Actually it's multiple ownership.
  • Safe (✔️)
  • impl Copy (❌): Please check the Official Documentation.

C. Related Notes

1. Copy trait vs move:

According to the official documentation:

It’s important to note that in these two examples, the only difference is whether you are allowed to access x after the assignment. Under the hood, both a copy and a move can result in bits being copied in memory, although this is sometimes optimized away.

So, be aware that move transfers ownership, while Copy has nothing to do with it.

2. Mutable References do not implement Copy

Some types can’t be copied safely. For example, copying &mut T would create an aliased mutable reference. Copying String would duplicate responsibility for managing the String’s buffer, leading to a double free.

It's good anyway to read the full Copy documentation page.

3. Dereferencing Pointers and Unsafe

The term unsafe here means that you won't be able to dereference the pointer unless with an unsafe function or block. Otherwise, you'll get the following error:

dereference of raw pointer is unsafe and requires unsafe function or block raw pointers may be null, dangling or unaligned; they can violate aliasing rules and cause data races: all of these are undefined behavior rustc (E0133).

4. ref is the same as &


提交答案