The Mechanics of Ownership, References, and Dereferences in Rust

The design choices of a programming language have direct implications on how we write code. One such design choice is the concept of ownership and borrowing in the Rust programming language.

Ownership, References and Immutability

Stated simply, the concept of ownership deems that we can only have one owner of a value at a time, this value can be passed around severally for read-only operations by immutably borrowing or referencing, but we can only have one mutable borrow at a time.

fn main() {
    let mut input = String::new();
    input.push_str("Hello World");
    println!("input value is: {:?}", input);

    let take_ownership = input;
    println!("Taken ownership of value {:?}", take_ownership);

    let _illegal = input; // throws an error -> use of moved value `input`
}

The error message tells us we are trying to use a value which has already been moved to another memory location. When we create the variable take_ownership, we move the value in the input’s memory location to take_ownership, thus trying to allocate input’s value to another variable fails, because the value is no longer there. This is all by design, imagine if we were successful in having two variables own the value at the same time, and then have both variables mutate the value; congratulations, we got ourselves a race condition.

There’s a work-around to this that makes the error go away quickly; Instead of taking ownership, we just borrow the value

let borrow_value = &input;
println!("...");

let another_borrow = &input
println!("...");

The ampersand sign & denotes that we are taking a reference to the memory address the value is stored, but we’re not taking ownership of the value itself. Now we can have as many borrows as we want, but there’s a catch: We can only have one mutable reference at a time.

let borrow_value = &mut input; 
let another_borrow = &mut input;

If you tried writing code like the one above, your Rust LSP should already be telling you that what you’re doing is unacceptable:

error[E0499]: cannot borrow input as mutable more than once

But it’s possible to have another mutable borrow when the first borrow goes out of scope. The code below runs successfully because we create the variable another_borrow after borrow_value has already been used and it’s scope ended.

let borrow_value = &mut input;
borrow_value.push_str(" Changers");

let another_borrow = &mut input;
println!("another_borrow: {:?}", another_borrow);

The reference’s scope start from where it is introduced and continues through the last time that reference is used; when the reference goes out of scope, it’s borrow ends, and the value becomes available for borrowing again. When all references to the value are gone, Rust frees the memory where the value is located. These rules of ownership, borrowing and scope are what enables Rust to be able to allocate and free memory safely without a garbage collector, how practical!

Dereferencing

We’ve established that references do not hold any values by themselves, instead they point to the location in memory where the actual value is stored. Now, what if we want to modify the actual value the reference is pointing at? Take this simple example:

let mut value = 20;
let ref_val = &mut value;

Imagine that we want to change the ref_value to 30; to a new Rustacean, the first thought would be to do something like this:

fn main() {
   let mut value = 20;
   let ref_val = &mut value;
   ref_val = 30;
}

Trying to write the above code will have the compiler sympathizing with us:

error[E0308]: mismatched types
  --> src/main.rs:20:17
   |
|     let ref_value = &mut value;
   |                     ---------- expected due to this value
|     ref_value = 30;
   |                 ^^ expected &mut {integer}, found integer
   |
help: consider dereferencing here to assign to the mutably borrowed value
   |
 |     *ref_value = 30;
   |     +

I encourage you to take a minute and read the error message keenly. We get the error because ref_value holds the reference to the value, and not the value itself; in other terms, we are trying to assign to the reference, and not the value it points to, and Rust does not allow us to assign directly to the reference because this would mutate the actual value. So, what do we do? The compiler has already helped us with that. To assign the integer to the actual value, we need to dereference ref_value and access the actual value behind it; we do this using the unary operator *.

let mut value = 20;
let ref_val = &mut value;
*ref_val = 30;

One question you may already have is why we didn’t have to do that with the push_str operations earlier:

let borrow_value = &mut input;
borrow_value.push_str(" Changers");

That’s because when we use the dot operator, the expression on the left-hand side of the dot is auto-referenced/auto-derefenced automatically. You can read more about the dot-operator here.

A more Interesting Problem

This article was inspired by a problem I encountered while working with the sqlx library; I wanted to have a database connection that I can reuse across multiple queries. Sqlx has a begin method that creates a database connection and immediately begins a new transaction, so what I need to do is figure out how to compose multi-statement transactions with it. My first attempt looks like so:

async fn demo_txn(db: PgPool) -> Result<()> {
	let tx = db.begin().await.map_errr(|err| {
        error!("error starting database transaction: {err}");
    })?;
    
	let row = sqlx::query("...").fetch_one(&mut tx).await?;
	
	sqlx::query("...").execute(&mut tx).await?;
}

Above, I create a transaction, and then try to consume a mutable reference to the transaction in my queries; however, the code throws this error:

error[E0277]: the trait bound &mut Transaction<'_, Postgres>: sqlx::Executor
<'_> is not satisfied
   --> src/routes/signup.rs:117:14
    |
 |     .execute(&mut tx)
    |      ------- ^^^^^^^ the trait sqlx::Executor<'_> is not implemented 
for &mut Transaction<'_, Postgres>
    |      |
    |      required by a bound introduced by this call
    |
    = help: the following other types implement trait sqlx::Executor<'c>:
              <&'c mut PgConnection as sqlx::Executor<'c>>
              <&'c mut PgListener as sqlx::Executor<'c>>
              <&'c mut AnyConnection as sqlx::Executor<'c>>
              <&Pool<DB> as sqlx::Executor<'p>>

The error tells us that the sqlx::Executor trait, which provides a database connection we can use for executing queries is not implemented for our mutable reference to the Transaction type. These are one of those errors that have you scratching your head because the compiler has no more help to offer you, we are basically on our own now. The logical thing to do here is to dig into other people’s code and see if I can find out how others construct multi-statement transactions in sqlx. I came across a similar problem on Github, and the solution offered is to dereference the transaction:

async fn demo_txn(db: PgPool) -> Result<()> {
	let tx = db.begin().await.map_errr(|err| {
        error!("error starting database transaction: {err}");
    })?;
    
	let row = sqlx::query("...").fetch_one(&mut *tx).await?; // notice the *
	
	sqlx::query("...").execute(&mut *tx).await?; //notice *
}

And true enough, the errors go away; Interesting, let’s dig a little deeper to understand what’s going on. The begin method we call on the db looks like so:

pub async fn begin(&self) -> Result<Transaction<'static, DB>, Error>

When we call ? on the Result, we are left with the Transaction type:

pub struct Transaction<'c, DB>
where
    DB: Database,
{ ...}

So, when we do *tx, we are asking for a mutable dereference to the Transaction because our methods are in a mutable expression context. Rust requires that types that want to be dereferenced implement the Deref trait - for immutable dereference, or the DerefMut trait for mutable dereferences. The transaction type implements both of these traits, here’s the DerefMut implementation:

impl<'c, DB> DerefMut for Transaction<'c, DB>
where
    DB: Database,
{
    #[inline]
    fn deref_mut(&mut self) -> &mut Self::Target {
        &mut self.connection
    }
}

The * uses the above DerefMut implementation and yields a mutable <DB as Database>::Connection (the associated connection type for whichever DB we’re using). I’m using Postgres, so the deref gets us a mutable PgConnection which implements the sqlx::Executor trait that was missing and thus causing the compilation error.

I understand this has been a long exposition, but an example like this goes to show how some of the errors we may encounter even with trait bound issues are directly tied to the concepts of ownership and references - and how deep they can go.

Finishing Up

Thanks for reading! I hope this article has helped shine some light on arguably some of the most important Rust concepts.