Yes, it is an accurate description of Cell. RefCell is best thought of as a single-threaded RwLock. The Cell type doesn't allow you to get an &mut to the conte

Yes, it is an accurate description of Cell. RefCell is best thought of as a single-threaded RwLock. The Cell type doesn't allow you to get an &mut to the contents because a &mut requires exclusive access to the contents, which requires some sort of locking to do through an aliasing reference. The Cell type also doesn't allow you to get an & to the contents, because a & requires the target to remain immutable for the duration of the reference. For Copy types, Cell provides access through set/get, whereas for non-Copy types you can use swap/set.