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Rust has a number of kinds of smart pointers, both in the standardlibrary and defined by users. Still, some operations that are possible withbuilt-in references are not possible to perform with user-defined smartpointers. Tyler Mandry, lead of the Rust project'slanguage team, spoke atRustConf 2026 about the lengthy effort to change that, and make smart pointersjust as flexible as built-in references.