📝In Rust, mutable references never alias

In Rust, two mutable references never point to the same location in memory—they never alias.

There is no safe way to create two &mut references to the same value, and creating two mutable references via unsafe code is undefined behavior. Which basically guarantees that if you have a &mut, it is exclusive. (In Rust, mut/const references are more about exclusive/shared access).

Because Aliasing only matters if a reference is aliased with another mutable reference, this allows compiler to perform more optimizations.

See also

• Fortran used to be faster than C because of aliasing

• Aliasing only matters if a reference is aliased with another mutable reference

• In Rust, mut/const references are more about exclusive/shared access

Backlinks

• 📝 In Rust, mut/const references are more about exclusive/shared access
• 📝 Aliasing only matters if a reference is aliased with another mutable reference
• 📝 § Aliasing
• 📝 Fortran used to be faster than C because of aliasing
• 📝 Rust
• 📝 § Programming Language