privKeyword

Explanation

priv has been reserved since the 2015 edition, but unlike most of the purely speculative entries in this section, it has an actual small history: priv was briefly real, usable syntax in pre-1.0 Rust. In that early design, visibility worked the other way around from today — items were implicitly public by default, and an explicit priv keyword was how you marked something private, the exact inverse role pub plays now. That design was reversed before Rust 1.0: today, items are private by default and pub is the marker you add to opt into visibility. priv was removed as functioning syntax but kept reserved, in case some future visibility refinement wants to reuse the word — no concrete proposal currently claims it.

Using priv as an ordinary identifier is a compile error today. The raw-identifier form r#priv is legal, the same escape hatch every reserved keyword offers.

Usage examples

Using the raw-identifier escape hatch

let priv = 5;     // error: expected identifier, found reserved keyword `priv`
let r#priv = 5;   // ok: the raw-identifier form escapes the reservation

Designing a public API

Today's visibility model expresses exactly what priv used to express, just with the default flipped: a struct's fields stay private unless explicitly marked pub, which is what lets a type keep its invariants enforced through a constructor instead of allowing direct field mutation.

pub struct Account {
    balance: i64, // private by default — no `priv` needed, this is the current default
}

impl Account {
    pub fn new(opening_balance: i64) -> Self {
        Account { balance: opening_balance.max(0) } // <- invariant enforced here, not by the field
    }

    pub fn balance(&self) -> i64 {
        self.balance
    }
}

If balance were public, nothing would stop external code from setting it to a negative value directly; keeping it private (today's default, once priv's job before 1.0) and exposing only a validating constructor and a read accessor is the same "invalid states unrepresentable" discipline the API Guidelines and Effective Rust both build their privacy advice around.

Explanation

Embedded support: Full

priv is still just reserved, unusable syntax under #![no_std] — keyword reservation is a lexer-level concept with no runtime footprint either way, so there's nothing target-specific about it. What is worth restating in an embedded setting is what priv used to do, and why today's inverted default fills the same role there: a HAL driver's register-twiddling internals stay private by the ordinary default (no priv needed, exactly as everywhere else in modern Rust), and only the handful of methods meant to be called from firmware code are opted in with pub — see pub for that split in more depth. priv itself contributes nothing further to that story in embedded code beyond what it contributes anywhere else — this is one of those cases where there's genuinely no embedded-specific nuance to add.

Usage examples

The raw-identifier escape hatch, unchanged under `#![no_std]`

#![no_std]

let priv = 5;     // error: expected identifier, found reserved keyword `priv`
let r#priv = 5;   // ok: the raw-identifier form escapes the reservation, same as on any hosted target

Today's default-private HAL internals doing `priv`'s old job

pub struct Adc {
    resolution_bits: u8, // private by default — no `priv` needed, this is the current default
}

impl Adc {
    pub fn new(resolution_bits: u8) -> Self {
        Adc { resolution_bits: resolution_bits.min(12) } // <- invariant enforced here, not by the field
    }
}