Certain types and traits that exist in the standard library are known to the Rust compiler. This chapter documents the special features of these types and traits.

Box<T> has a few special features that Rust doesn't currently allow for user defined types.

• The dereference operator for Box<T> produces a place which can be moved from. This means that the * operator and the destructor of Box<T> are built-in to the language.
• Methods can take Box<Self> as a receiver.
• A trait may be implemented for Box<T> in the same crate as T, which the orphan rules prevent for other generic types.

std::cell::UnsafeCell<T> is used for interior mutability. It ensures that the compiler doesn't perform optimisations that are incorrect for such types. It also ensures that static items which have a type with interior mutability aren't placed in memory marked as read only.

std::marker::PhantomData<T> is a zero-sized, minimum alignment, type that is considered to own a T for the purposes of variance, drop check and auto traits.

The traits in std::ops and std::cmp are used to overload operators, indexing expressions and call expressions.

As well as overloading the unary * operator, Deref and DerefMut are also used in method resolution and deref coercions.

The Drop trait provides a destructor, to be run whenever a value of this type is to be destroyed.

The Copy trait changes the semantics of a type implementing it. Values whose type implements Copy are copied rather than moved upon assignment. Copy cannot be implemented for types which implement Drop, or which have fields that are not Copy. Copy is implemented by the compiler for

• Numeric types
• char and bool
• Tuples of Copy types
• Arrays of Copy types
• Shared references
• Raw pointers
• Function pointers and function item types

The Clone trait is a supertrait of Copy, so it also needs compiler generated implementations. It is implemented by the compiler for the following types:

• Types with a built-in Copy implementation (see above)
• Tuples of Clone types
• Arrays of Clone types

The Send trait indicates that a value of this type is safe to send from one thread to another.

The Sync trait indicates that a value of this type is safe to share between multiple threads. This trait must be implemented for all types used in immutable static items.

The Send, Sync, UnwindSafe and RefUnwindSafe traits are auto traits. Auto traits have special properties.

First, auto traits are automatically implemented using the following rules:

• &T, &mut T, *const T, *mut T, [T; n] and [T] implement the trait if T does.
• Function item types and function pointers automatically implement the trait.
• Structs, enums, unions and tuples implement the trait if all of their fields do.
• Closures implement the trait if the types of all of their captures do. A closure that captures a T by shared reference and a U by value implements any auto traits that both &T and U do.

Auto traits can also have negative implementations, shown as impl !AutoTrait for T in the standard library documentation, that override the automatic implementations. For example *mut T has a negative implementation of Send, and so *mut T and (*mut T,) are not Send. Finally, auto traits may be added as a bound to any trait object: Box<Debug + Send + UnwindSafe> is a valid type.

The Sized trait indicates that the size of this type is known at compile-time; that is, it's not a dynamically sized type. Type parameters are Sized by default. Sized is always implemented automatically by the compiler, not by implementation items.