Ownership

The chapter on ownership in the Rust book is good to read and re-read periodically, even for experienced Rust programmers. It makes a bunch of concepts related to ownership much more explicit with practical examples, including coverage of often-taken-for granted concepts like &str vs String, Copy vs Clone, etc.

Reminder:

• Each value in Rust has an owner.
• There can only be one owner at a time.
• When the owner goes out of scope, the value will be dropped.

ToOwned#

What’s the difference between Clone and ToOwned? The answer is in the docs:

Some types make it possible to go from borrowed to owned, usually by implementing the Clone trait. But Clone works only for going from &T to T

In other words, Clone is for going from a reference of a type to an owned value of the same type. ToOwned however has a required associated type which lets you return any other type. So you can go from &T to U. This is what “borrow-generalized” means.