I just had a random thought: a common pattern in Rust is to things such as:
let vec_a: Vec<String> = /* ... */;
let vec_b: Vec<String> = vec_a.into_iter().filter(some_filter).collect();
Usually, we need to be aware of the fact that Iterator::collect()
allocates for the container we are collecting into. But in the snippet above, we’ve consumed a container of the same type. And since Rust has full ownership of the vector, in theory the memory allocated by vec_a
could be reused to store the collected results of vec_b
, meaning everything could be done in-place and no additional allocation is necessary.
It’s a highly specific optimization though, so I wonder if such a thing has been implemented in the Rust compiler. Anybody who has an idea about this?
The standard library does have some specialisation internally for certain iterators and collection combinations. Not sure if it will optimise that one specifically, but
Vec::into_iter().collect::()
is optimised (it may look silly, but it comes up with functions returningimpl Iterator