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In addition to containers, it seems to be useful for 'wrapper' types adding decorators to the 'base' object without having to wrap/unwrap the new type in each operation.

Classic OOP would use inheritance to achieve this, while something like Deref allows you to use it with all the added behavior - without losing the possibility to assign to it values of the base type.

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A good discussion of why using Deref to simulate inheritance is considered an "anti-pattern": https://rust-unofficial.github.io/patterns/anti_patterns/der...

Thanks for this; I saw it, and it made me twitch, but I didn't know why... All I had was "composition over inheritance"

In general, I don't like the term "anti-pattern" or its sibling "best practices". Those terms give off an authoritative aura instead of spurring curiosity, and often people don't seem to remember the rationale but just associate X with absolute bad and Y with absolute good.

Softer language like "guidelines" and "recommendations" or playful language like "tricks" or "hacks" seems more useful to me. "Hacks" is dirty and _interesting_ instead of normative and unquestionable.

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