Borrow Errors
As a concrete example of how these borrowing rules prevent memory errors, consider the case of modifying a collection while there are references to its elements:
fn main() { let mut vec = vec![1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; let elem = &vec[2]; vec.push(6); println!("{elem}"); }
Similarly, consider the case of iterator invalidation:
fn main() { let mut vec = vec![1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; for elem in &vec { vec.push(elem * 2); } }
This slide should take about 3 minutes.
- In both of these cases, modifying the collection by pushing new elements into it can potentially invalidate existing references to the collection's elements if the collection has to reallocate.