Rust

10.3    Deref Coercion

Deref coercion is a feature that lets you automatically treat a smart pointer (or a reference) as if it’s the actual value without needing to manually dereference it. For instance, if you have a Box<T> or String, the compiler can automatically dereference these types when necessary to access the underlying data.

The Deref trait is defined in the following way:

trait Deref {    type Target: ?Sized;    fn deref(&self) -> &Self::Target;}  

When deref coercion is applied, the compiler repeatedly calls the deref method until the required reference type is obtained.

Smart pointers such as Box<T> are common use cases for deref coercion because they let you automatically access the data inside them, making the code simpler. The code ...