Clone

Sometimes you want to make a copy of a value. The Clone trait accomplishes this.

#[derive(Default)]
struct Backends {
    hostnames: Vec<String>,
    weights: Vec<f64>,
}

impl Backends {
    fn set_hostnames(&mut self, hostnames: &Vec<String>) {
        self.hostnames = hostnames.clone();
        self.weights = hostnames.iter().map(|_| 1.0).collect();
    }
}
This slide should take about 2 minutes.

The idea of Clone is to make it easy to spot where heap allocations are occurring. Look for .clone() and a few others like Vec::new or Box::new.

It’s common to “clone your way out” of problems with the borrow checker, and return later to try to optimize those clones away.