> Therefore, any use of transmute that extends a lifetime is UB if it causes the reference to outlive the referent. By itself, a transmute of a currently-live

> Therefore, any use of transmute that extends a lifetime is UB if it causes the reference to outlive the referent. By itself, a transmute of a currently-live reference cannot make it outlive its referent, in the sense used by the Rustonomicon. As it says later [0], a reference is alive until the point when it is last used, and no further. Thus, with unsafe code, the lifetime of a reference can extend past the point when it stops being alive. As a consequence, extending the lifetime can never cause UB by itself: only using the reference after it has been invalidated can cause language-level UB. Since language-level UB is based on liveness rather than lifetime, the compiler must assume that a reference passed to a function is valid even after it returns, up until the caller invalidates the reference by performing an operation incompatible with it remaining alive. [0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/lifetimes.html#the-area-covered-by-a-lifetime https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/lifetimes.html#the-area-co...