When you borrow from a RefCell, the reference you get has a shorter lifetime than the RefCell‘s. That’s because the reference’s lifetime is restricted by the guard returned by borrow(). That guard ensures that nobody else can take a mutable reference to the value until the guard is dropped. However, you are trying to return … Read more
It is not entirely correct to ask when Cell or RefCell should be used over Box and Rc because these types solve different problems. Indeed, more often than not RefCell is used together with Rc in order to provide mutability with shared ownership. So yes, use cases for Cell and RefCell are entirely dependent on … Read more
You can create a new struct similar to the Ref<‘a,T> guard returned by RefCell::borrow(), in order to wrap this Ref and avoid having it going out of scope, like this: use std::cell::Ref; struct FooGuard<‘a> { guard: Ref<‘a, MutableInterior>, } then, you can implement the Deref trait for it, so that it can be used as … Read more