Rustlings thread exercise, why do I NOT dereference Mutex(Struct)?

Question

I\'m learning Rust and have no experience with threads. I\'m going through the Rustlings course and I\'ve solved the threads1.rs exercise, but I don\'t understand w

Answer 1

status_shared is of type MutexGuard. MutexGuard implements the DerefMut and Deref traits, with a deref target of T (the type which is stored inside the Mutex - JobStatus in your case.

When you use behind a . behind an object the rust compiler will automatically try to deref it into something where the requested operation can be performed. Therefore the explicit dereferencing is not necessary here. This behavior is described in the Rust book in the Deref chapter

Answer 2

Arc<T> automatically dereferences via the Deref trait.

References:

• https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.Arc.html#deref-behavior

Answer 3

As @Matthias247 said, dereferencing is automatic when behind a .

Additionally, your attempt at explicit dereference fails because of operator precedence: *status_shared.jobs_completed is equivalent to *(status_shared.jobs_completed) so it attempts to dereference an u32 and fails, but you want (*status_shared).jobs_completed in order to dereference the Arc<JobStatus>.