> Safely borrowing things by reference is one of Rust's headline features Sure, but it's worth noting that references in Rust do not exist merely to avoid pass

> Safely borrowing things by reference is one of Rust's headline features Sure, but it's worth noting that references in Rust do not exist merely to avoid passing by-value. They also exist to make it easier to deal with Rust's ownership semantics: they let you pass things to a function without also requiring the function to "pass back" those things as returned values. In other words, references let you do `fn foo(x: &Bar)` rather than `fn foo(x: Bar) -> Bar`. This is a unique and interesting consequence of languages with by-default move semantics.