Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1096028/

Rust has a number of kinds of smart pointers, both in the standard
library and defined by users. Still, some operations that are possible with
built-in references are not possible to perform with user-defined smart
pointers. Tyler Mandry, lead of the Rust project’s

language team, spoke at

RustConf 2026 about the lengthy effort to change that, and make smart pointers
just as flexible as built-in references.