I spent pretty much the whole day banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how ownership and borrowing work in Rust, and finally have a grasp on what’s going on.

In this post I’m going to demonstrate how these concepts work through some examples of code that break Rust’s rules, and explain why they’re problematic. I assume very little knowledge of the Rust programming language. I’ve also added comments to all of the code blocks that indicate whether the code is valid Rust or not.

Example 1: Appending values to a vector of strings

In this example, we take two vectors. One of them, myvec , is populated with some values, and is immutable. The other one is instantiated as mutable, and contains no values. We then take one of the values from myvec , and attempt to add it to othervec with Vec::push() .

// invalid fn main () { let myvec : Vec < String > = vec! [ String :: from ( "hello" ), String :: from ( "world" ) ]; let mut othervec : Vec < String > = Vec :: new (); // `myvec.get(1)` doesn't return a `String`, rather, it returns an `Option`, // and therefore `.unwrap()` needs to be used to get the value out of it othervec .push ( myvec .get ( 1 ) .unwrap ()); }

This seems like a totally reasonable thing to do–in many other programming langauges, you can totally get a value from an array or list, and stick it in another data structure.

But what happens in Rust?

$ cargo run error[E0308]: mismatched types .. expected struct ` std::string::String ` , found reference ...

Scary type mismatch error!

The upshot of what is happening here is that myvec.get(1) didn’t actually return a value of type String , rather it returned a reference to a String , or &String . References to strings can be used in readonly contexts, for instance, you can do:

println! ( "{}" , myvec .get ( 1 ) .unwrap ())

However, since othervec is a Vec of type Vec<String> , you cannot push a value of type &String on it. That’s fine, we can use the dereference character * , right?

// invalid ... let myvec : Vec < String > = vec! [ String :: from ( "hello" ), String :: from ( "world" )]; let mut othervec : Vec < String > = Vec :: new (); othervec .push ( * myvec .get ( 1 ) .unwrap ()); ...

Nope. The error we get this time is “cannot move out of borrowed content”.

What the compiler is telling us here is that since the return value of myvec.get(1) is a “borrowed” value, it cannot be moved to another variable.

Borrowing

To expound on this in more detail, values in Rust can only be assigned to one name at a time. Assigning a value to a different name causes it to no longer be accessible under the previous name. As an example:

// invalid let x = String :: from ( "hello" ); let y = x ; println! ( "{}" , x );

This errors out with the error “Use of moved value ‘x’”. This behavior is really important in Rust, because in Rust, when variables go out of scope, the memory that they refer to is deallocated–there is no garbage collection. In order to maintain this behavior, and to prevent invalid memory access, there can only be one “owner” of data at a time. In this example, x is the original owner, and then y becomes the owner.

So that being said, if data needs to be read in other contexts, for instance, inside other functions, references to values can be assigned to other names. For instance, the following compiles and works:

// valid let x = String :: from ( "hello" ); let y = & x ; println! ( "{}" , x ); println! ( "{}" , y );

The expression &x is an example of “borrowing”. The name y as assigned a borrowed reference to the value of x . References by default are not mutable (mutable references are a thing), and have other constraints to them that I’ll explain in further detail later.

Back to the example

Returning to our original example, myvec.get(1).unwrap() returns a reference to the value at index 1 in myvec , and does not perform a move. However, in assigning this value to a variable, that would be performing a move. The current owner of that value is myvec . If we were to do the following:

// invalid let myvec : Vec < String > = vec! [ String :: from ( "hello" ), String :: from ( "world" ) ]; let mut othervec : Vec < String > = Vec :: new (); let val = * myvec .get ( 1 ) .unwrap ();

this would be switching the owner of that data to be the name val . That’s not allowed, because you cannot move a value that has been borrowed!

Think through the implications of being able to do this for a minute. If it were possible to transfer ownership of myvec.get(1) to val , that would mean that as soon as val went out of scope, that position 1 in myvec would now refer to an invalid block of memory.

Also, we’d be able to do scary stuff like:

// invalid fn main () { let myvec : Vec < String > = vec! [ String :: from ( "hello" ), String :: from ( "world" ) ]; let mut othervec : Vec < String > = Vec :: new (); othervec .push ( myvec .get ( 1 ) .unwrap ()); myvec .clear (); }

Since .clear() deallocates all the memory, reads on othervec would result in invalid memory reads after it is called.

To fix this, we could assign the reference to val , like so:

// invalid let myvec : Vec < String > = vec! [ String :: from ( "hello" ), String :: from ( "world" ) ]; let mut othervec : Vec < String > = Vec :: new (); let val = myvec .get ( 1 ) .unwrap ();

but we would not be able to append this value to a Vec of type Vec<String> , because val would be of type &String .

Alright, so how do we solve this to accomplish what we want? That would have to depend on what exactly we want to accomplish. We cannot move ownership of myvec.get(1) to othervec , so if we wanted othervec to refer to the actual position in the vector, we would have to change othervec to instead be a vector of &String :

// valid fn main () { let myvec : Vec < String > = vec! [ String :: from ( "hello" ), String :: from ( "world" ) ]; let mut othervec : Vec <& String > = Vec :: new (); othervec .push ( myvec .get ( 1 ) .unwrap ()); }

This, however, would not allow us to make any modifications to the values in othervec , and while I’ll discuss this in more detail in the next section, we won’t be able to take myvec out of scope until othervec is out of scope.

On the other hand, if we just care about the value at position 1 , then we can copy the string:

// valid fn main () { let myvec : Vec < String > = vec! [ String :: from ( "hello" ), String :: from ( "world" ) ]; let mut othervec : Vec < String > = Vec :: new (); othervec .push ( myvec .get ( 1 ) .unwrap () .to_string ()); }

The to_string() method here on &String allocates a new String , and gives ownership to othervec .

Borrowing Summary

This constraint that Rust has that requires that value cannot be assigned to more than one owner solves a big problem that happens in other programming languages, like C, in which invalid memory can continue to be read. The implications of solving that problem are pretty crazy too: another way of looking at this is that when we pull a value out of myvec with: *myvec.get(1).unwrap() , the resulting value knows where it came from, and knows that because it has an owner, it cannot be assigned to another variable. In other programming languages, if you pull a variable out of a list-like object, like in the following Python:

x = [ "a" , "b" , "c" ] y = x [ 1 ]

It is irrelevant where the value now stored in y came from, it can be treated like any other string. That’s not the case in Rust!

For more information on borrowing and ownership, check out these sections in the Rust book:

Example 2: With a separate function

Alright, so in one of the examples, I mentioned above, I mentioned that we could construct othervec as a Vec<&String> , a vector of string references. In this section, I’m going to flesh out handling references in more detail.

To demonstrate that, here is another section of invalid code:

// invalid fn copy_to_new_vec ( myvec : & Vec < String > , othervec : & mut Vec < String > ) -> & mut Vec < String > { othervec .push ( myvec .get ( 1 ) .unwrap () .to_string ()); return othervec ; } fn main () { let myvec = vec! [ String :: from ( "hello" ), String :: from ( "world" )]; let mut othervec : Vec < String > = Vec :: new (); let newvec : & Vec < String > = copy_to_new_vec ( & myvec , & mut othervec ); }

which compiles with the following error:

$ cargo run ... expected lifetime parameter ...

This is very similar to example 1. The main difference is that in this example, we extract the logic to copy the value from position 1 in myvec in a function called copy_to_new_vec . Instead of passing ownership of myvec and othervec to copy_to_new_vec , we pass a reference to myvec , and mutable reference to othervec . othervec needs to be passed as a mutable reference, since we write values to it in copy_to_new_vec . copy_to_new_vec in turn returns back a reference to othervec . newvec , in turn, is a reference to othervec .

Alright, this seems reasonable, why is the compiler complaining to us?

The catch with functions that return references to other objects is that if the objects that are being referenced go out of scope or are deallocated, then reading from our reference will result in invalid memory reads.

Introducing “lifetime parameters”

To solve this problem, Rust has a notion of “lifetime parameters”. These are pieces of information that you can give to the Rust compiler that tell it what exact object your references are referencing. With that information, if the object that is being referenced goes out of scope while the reference is still in scope, the Rust compiler will complain.

Lifetime parameters are normally inferred by the compiler, but in this example, because there are two parameters that the return value could potentially be referencing, the lifetime parameters must be explicitly provided. They look similar to generics in Rust:

// valid fn copy_to_new_vec < 'a > ( vec : & Vec < String > , othervec : & 'a mut Vec < String > ) -> & 'a mut Vec < String > { othervec .push ( vec .get ( 1 ) .unwrap () .to_string ()); return othervec ; } fn main () { let vec = vec! [ String :: from ( "hello" ), String :: from ( "world" )]; let mut othervec : Vec < String > = Vec :: new (); copy_to_new_vec ( & vec , & mut othervec ); }

Adding a string with a single quote between angle braces parameterizes a function with lifetime parameters. These can then be attached to parameters and return values, shown above, to indicate a relationship. With the lifetime parameters added here, we’ve indicated to the Rust compiler that the return value of copy_to__new_vec is dependent on the second argument. Now that that’s the case, if we try to do something like:

// invalid fn copy_to_new_vec < 'a > ( vec : & Vec < String > , othervec : & 'a mut Vec < String > ) -> & 'a mut Vec < String > { othervec .push ( vec .get ( 1 ) .unwrap () .to_string ()); return othervec ; } fn main () { let vec = vec! [ String :: from ( "hello" ), String :: from ( "world" )]; let newvec = copy_to_new_vec ( & vec , & mut Vec :: new ()); newvec .get ( 0 ); }

The compiler complains with the error:

$ cargo run ... Borrowed value does not live long enough ...

What this error is saying is that since the return value of copy_to_new_vec is in scope longer than othervec in copy_to_new_vec , this is problematic.

If this was allowed, the line newvec.get(1) would fail, since the value that newvec is referencing would be have been deallocated. This is because immediately after the line let newvec = copy_to_new_vec(&vec, &mut Vec::new()); , the second argument to copy_to_new_vec would be out of scope.

Check out more information about lifetimes in Rust here

Conclusion

Hopefully these examples help with your understanding of the borrow system in Rust. It definitely takes a lot of getting used to, and can be a struggle at first. But once you’ve gotten your head around it, the borrow system becomes an incredible safety net that prevents a lot of issues that are common in other systems programming languages.

Happy Rusting!