When writing impl blocks, you can now elide lifetime annotations in some situations.

Consider a trait like MyIterator:

trait MyIterator {
    type Item;
    fn next(&mut self) -> Option<Self::Item>;
}

In Rust 2015, if we wanted to implement this iterator for mutable references to Iterators, we'd need to write this:

impl<'a, I: MyIterator> MyIterator for &'a mut I {
    type Item = I::Item;
    fn next(&mut self) -> Option<Self::Item> {
        (*self).next()
    }
}

Note all of the 'a annotations. In Rust 2018, we can write this:

impl<I: MyIterator> MyIterator for &mut I {
    type Item = I::Item;
    fn next(&mut self) -> Option<Self::Item> {
        (*self).next()
    }
}

Similarly, lifetime annotations can appear due to a struct that contains references:

struct SetOnDrop<'a, T> {
    borrow: &'a mut T,
    value: Option<T>,
}

In Rust 2015, to implement Drop on this struct, we'd write:

impl<'a, T> Drop for SetOnDrop<'a, T> {
    fn drop(&mut self) {
        if let Some(x) = self.value.take() {
            *self.borrow = x;
        }
    }
}

But in Rust 2018, we can combine elision with the anonymous lifetime and write this instead.

impl<T> Drop for SetOnDrop<'_, T> {
    fn drop(&mut self) {
        if let Some(x) = self.value.take() {
            *self.borrow = x;
        }
    }
}