Rust Essentials - Second Edition

Overview of pointers

In the following table we summarize the different pointers used in Rust. T represents a generic type. We haven't yet encountered the Arc, *const and *mut pointers, but they are included here for completeness.

Notation	Pointer type	What can this pointer do?
&T	Reference	Allows one or more references to read T
&mut T	Mutable Reference	Allows a single reference to read and write T
Box<T>	Box	Heap allocated T with a single owner that may read and write T.
Rc<T>	Rc pointer	Heap allocated T with many readers
Cell<T>	Shared mutable memory location with Copy implemented
RefCell<T>	Mutable memory location
Arc<T>	Arc pointer	Same as above, but safe mutable sharing across ...