[MichaelGG]

A very short TLDR, in my limited opinion, is basically "Take an ML-ish, make sure everything has C-like performance, while prohibiting all memory safety issues and eliminating aliasing". From those basic principles things you can start reasoning a lot about what Rust must do.

But I agree it does feel a bit weird to need to explain pointers while also assuming people understand memory layouts. There should probably be a quick guide to memory usage, maybe even using C, and from there introduce Rust's concepts on top. It's certainly a hard problem to introduce a high-level, functional, language that also has very powerful low-level concepts.

Thanks so much Steve for doing this work. Reading the guide made it all click into focus for me when I started, and the rest is _mostly_ syntax.

[kibwen]

Note that Rust doesn't eliminate aliasing, it merely tracks it very precisely. Taking a reference is a trivial way to create an alias, though obviously while the alias is alive you are restricted in what you can do to the referent.

[seabee]

Aliasing is only a problem because they prevent you assuming two values are independent of each other: a write to one could affect the other, if they are aliased.

When you enforce immutability of aliases, as Rust does, aliasing stops being a special case. The underlying value may be the same, but the behaviour is identical to when they are independent.

The only time you have problems thereafter is when you do weird things with the value's address which only coincidentally works. For example, comparing interned strings or Java's Integer objects using == works for other interned strings and small integers, respectively.

[MichaelGG]

How about "eliminating problems caused by aliasing", which I suppose is a subset of memory safety.