Crate pointer_identity

Pointer Identity

Rust has some traits that operate on values:

• Ord and PartialOrd check the ordering of values,
• Eq and PartialEq check equality of values,
• Hash computes a hash sum of values.

When using smart pointers such as Arc, Rc and Box in Rust, these will forward the implementation to the underlying types. Generally speaking, this makes sense and is the intended behavior.

However, in some cases this might not be what you need. For example, in some cases where you have a cache of reference-counted values, you may want it to determine if two values are the same just by looking at their pointer address rather than inspecting the value.

This crate lets you achieve that by offering a wrapper type, PointerIdentity, that you can use to wrap any value which implements Pointer to get it to use the pointer address as identity for comparisons and hashing rather than the value of the data it is holding.

Structs

• PointerIdentity
  Wrapper type that uses the pointer address rather than the value as the identity for the PartialEq, Eq, PartialOrd, Ord and Hash traits.

Traits

• Pointer
  Type that stores its value in an allocation and can retrieve a pointer to the value.