nomicon/vec-deref.md

% Deref

Alright! We've got a decent minimal ArrayStack implemented. We can push, we can
pop, and we can clean up after ourselves. However there's a whole mess of functionality
we'd reasonably want. In particular, we have a proper array, but none of the slice
functionality. That's actually pretty easy to solve: we can implement `Deref<Target=[T]>`.
This will magically make our Vec coerce to and behave like a slice in all sorts of
conditions.

All we need is `slice::from_raw_parts`.

```rust
use std::ops::Deref;

impl<T> Deref for Vec<T> {
    type Target = [T];
    fn deref(&self) -> &[T] {
        unsafe {
            ::std::slice::from_raw_parts(*self.ptr, self.len)
        }
    }
}
```

And let's do DerefMut too:

```rust
use std::ops::DerefMut;

impl<T> DerefMut for Vec<T> {
    fn deref_mut(&mut self) -> &mut [T] {
        unsafe {
            ::std::slice::from_raw_parts_mut(*self.ptr, self.len)
        }
    }
}
```

Now we have `len`, `first`, `last`, indexing, slicing, sorting, `iter`, `iter_mut`,
and all other sorts of bells and whistles provided by slice. Sweet!