Rust References

playground.rs

fn main() {
  //String is a (possibly) mutable, growable slice of UTF-8 characters
  let mut mutable_string: String = String::from("my owned string");
  
  //We can borrow a String as an immutable &str, because of the Deref trait
  let borrowed_str: &str = &mutable_string;
  
  //Vec is a (possibly) mutable, growable contiguous array of things
  let mut mutable_vec: Vec<i32> = vec![1, 2, 3];
  
  //We can borrow a Vec<T> as an immutable &[T], because of the Deref trait
  let borrowed_slice: &[i32] = &mutable_vec[..];
  
  //Question: Can we mutate mutable_string and mutable_vec now?
  
  //Most things in Rust don't have a different base type for owned vs borrowed references
  //We can use the Cow<'a, T> (clone on write) to work with borrowed and owned types
}