[$] Beyond the &

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.