Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

Assuming `a` does not have an inherent method named `eq`, I don't think those resolve differently at all. They certainly both fail in the same way with the code mentioned

Oh, sorry, the problem here is b not a, my bad. Actually in that case it's far more stark, we're not looking for a method at all, we're looking to see if &b satisfies a certain trait

yes, we could implement stuff here to make it better, but "does b or *(n)b have a method foo" is different from "does b or &*(n)b work as T in PartialEq<T> for str".

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2018&gist=be5ff1a4c279c3f05e1d4607391623ec … is a more concrete explanation of what I mean. `Self` is special cased in more than just dot form

I don't understand how that's special casing self types? Deref coercions give up pretty easily, that's the root of this. Here it's giving up on the UFCS form only, with the autoderef working: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2018&gist=c0197afb83c273b0f4181ddef6fd0cf6 …

Probably the biggest way that self is getting special cased here is that it won't try to deref self but it will try to deref other arguments (why is `PartialEq<Inner> for Outer` fine there but not `PartialEq<Outer> for Inner`?)

but your example is already asymmetric, it's breaking because `y` is MyRc, not because it's not self. It fails if you swap y with x, it has nothing to do with the receiver being special cased

What's happening is that for x it's managing to find a single impl that doesn't require coercion. it's done! it's able to coerce for y because there's a single impl, so all the expected types are known