152. RefCell — When You Need to Actually Borrow the Inside

Wed, 20 May 2026 17:00:00 +0100

This morning’s Cell<T> only lets you swap whole values in and out. The moment you want to call .push() on the Vec inside, or hand out a &str slice of the String inside, you need a real &mut — and that’s exactly what RefCell<T> gives you, just with the aliasing rules checked at runtime instead of compile time.

Refcell on rustbites

152. RefCell — When You Need to Actually Borrow the Inside