Yes. All `&mut` references in Rust are equivalent to C's `restrict` qualified pointers. In the past I measured a ~15% real world performance improvement in one of my projects due to this (rustc has/had a flag where you can turn this on/off; it was disabled by default for quite some time due to codegen bugs in LLVM).

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steveklabnik 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not just all &mut T, but also all &T, where the T does not transitively contain an UnsafeCell<T>. Click "show llvm ir" instead of "build" here: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=release&edit...

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marcianx 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I was confused by this at first since `&T` clearly allows aliasing (which is what C's `restrict` is about). But I realize that Steve meant just the optimization opportunity: you can be guaranteed that (in the absence of UB), the data behind the `&T` can be known to not change in the absence of a contained `UnsafeCell<T>`, so you don't have to reload it after mutations through other pointers.

	▲	steveklabnik 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes. It's a bit tricky to think about, because while it is literally called 'noalias', what it actually means is more subtle. I already linked to a version of the C spec below, https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3220.pdf but if anyone is curious, this part is in "6.7.4.2 Formal definition of restrict" on page 122. In some ways, this is kind of the core observation of Rust: "shared xor mutable". Aliasing is only an issue if the aliasing leads to mutability. You can frame it in terms of aliasing if you have to assume all aliases can mutate, but if they can't, then that changes things.
	▲	salmon640 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[flagged]

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dmitrygr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you not use restrict in your normal everyday C code that you write? I use it in my normal C code.

	▲	kouteiheika 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I used to use it, but very rarely, since it's instant UB if you get it wrong. In tiny codebases which you can hold in your head it's probably practical to sprinkle it everywhere, but in anything bigger it's quite risky. Nevertheless, I don't write normal everyday C code anymore since Rust has pretty much made it completely obsolete for the type of software I write.