Rust Ownership Rules
I read somewhere that immutable and mutable borrows are perhaps alternatively understood as exclusive and shared borrows.<p>This means, if you have a &mut then you have an exclusive borrow. No other borrows are possible as long as your &mut lives (i. e. did not yet go out of scope). Usually this exclusive borrow is used for mutating values.<p>This dichotomy in terminology is shown when you learn about interior mutability. Here you can mutate values without having an exclusive borrow, an example is RefCell. The price you pay for this convenience is run-time checking of access. RefCell disallows mutation if some other location in your code already has asked for mutable access.