> Unfortunately, it looks like he doesn't really understand borrowing. The key idea of borrowing is that a borrowed reference can't outlive the thing it came fr

> Unfortunately, it looks like he doesn't really understand borrowing. The key idea of borrowing is that a borrowed reference can't outlive the thing it came from. It's a lifetime thing, not an immutability thing. As a rust newbie, this touches on something I've been trying to figure out how to think about. Should I think of `&` in terms of ownership exclusively, or is it also useful to think about passing a pointer vs copying the data? That is, suppose I have something that, semantically, I want to move into a function, and which the function later returns. I think I could also pass a `& mut` instead. I'm trying to decide how to reason about that decision. Is the compiler smart enough to turn moving/returning into passing a pointer behind the scenes? If it's a large struct do I need to think about that "optimization" of instead passing just a `&` instead of moving the whole thing?