Currently, Rust lacks a nice way to compare two values of type &T or Cell<T> for identity of references (as opposed to identity of the stored values). With a, b having type &T, one has to write a as *const _ == a as *const _, which is not exactly discoverable nor nice to look at.

We (eddyb, kimundi and me) discussed this on IRC, kimundi made the following proposal:

 fn ptr_eq<T>(a: *const T, b: *const T) -> bool { a == b }

Thanks to coercions, in the above scenario, we can now write "ptr_eq(a, b)". eddyb was opposed to a function providing "reference" equality on &T, due to the difference of references in Rust and other languages (in particular, involving zero-sized types).

I think some nice way of comparing pointers (references) for equality should be provided, that does not force the user to manually write down a cast to a "dangerous" raw pointer (though of course the usage above is completely safe).