rust - How to clone an array with length bigger than 32?

Question

A fixed-length array of a native type (or of a type that implements the Copy trait) can be cloned in Rust up to the length of 32. That is, this compiles:

fn main() {
    let source: [i32; 32] = [0; 32]; // length 32
    let _cloned = source.clone();
}

But this doesn't:

fn main() {
    let source: [i32; 33] = [0; 33]; // length 33
    let _cloned = source.clone(); // <-- compile error
}

In fact, the trait Clone only declares a method for each generic array length, from 0 to 32.

What is an efficient and idiomatic way to clone a generic array of length, say, 33?

Answer 1

You can't add the impl Clone in your own code. This problem will be fixed at some point, in the mean time you can mostly work around it with varying amount of effort:

• If you just have a local variable of a concrete type and the type is Copy (as in your example), you can simply copy rather than cloning, i.e., let _cloned = source;.
• If the array is a field of a struct you want to implement Clone for (and derive won't work), you can still manually implement Clone and using the above trick in the implementation.
• Cloning an array of non-Copy types is trickier, because Clone can fail. You could write out [x[0].clone(), x[1].clone(), ...] for as many times as you need, it's a lot of work but at least it's certain to be correct.
• If all else fails, you can still create a newtype wrapper. This requires quite a bit of boilerplate to delegate all the other traits you need, but then you can (again, manually) implement Clone.