Clean up Box documentation.

Without the `box` keyword, one of these two reasons is not correct, so
let's just eliminate this section and elaborate on the reason for the
legit use case inline.

Fixes #24511
This commit is contained in:
Steve Klabnik 2015-04-20 10:05:57 -04:00
parent 5910dc0e8e
commit ac09864c90

View File

@ -10,14 +10,9 @@
//! A pointer type for heap allocation.
//!
//! `Box<T>`, casually referred to as a 'box', provides the simplest form of
//! heap allocation in Rust. Boxes provide ownership for this allocation, and
//! drop their contents when they go out of scope.
//!
//! Boxes are useful in two situations: recursive data structures, and
//! occasionally when returning data. [The Pointer chapter of the
//! Book](../../../book/pointers.html#best-practices-1) explains these cases in
//! detail.
//! `Box<T>`, casually referred to as a 'box', provides the simplest form of heap allocation in
//! Rust. Boxes provide ownership for this allocation, and drop their contents when they go out of
//! scope.
//!
//! # Examples
//!
@ -43,6 +38,16 @@
//! ```
//!
//! This will print `Cons(1, Box(Cons(2, Box(Nil))))`.
//!
//! Recursive structures must be boxed, because if the definition of `Cons` looked like this:
//!
//! ```rust,ignore
//! Cons(T, List<T>),
//! ```
//!
//! It wouldn't work. This is because the size of a `List` depends on how many elements are in the
//! list, and so we don't know how much memory to allocate for a `Cons`. By introducing a `Box`,
//! which has a defined size, we know how big `Cons` needs to be.
#![stable(feature = "rust1", since = "1.0.0")]