Ownership

Rust designers chose to not call references "pointers", because they come with special semantic meanings and restrictions.

There are two kinds of reference:

• Shared reference: &
• Mutable reference: &mut

There are two rules that all references must follow:

• A reference cannot outlive its referent.
• A mutable reference cannot be aliased.

What is "aliasing"?

Variables, References, and Pointers alias if they refer to overlapping regions of memory.

This definition may change (may become tighter) as Rust devs hone the definition further.

Alias analysis allows the compiler to perform useful/powerful optimizations.

Lifetimes

Lifetimes are named regions of code that a reference must be valid for. Regions may be fairly complex, since they correspond to execution paths (which may branch). It's possible to invalidate a reference as long as it's reinitialized before it's used again.

Each let statement implicitly introduces a scope.