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.