Rust tips: Box, RC, Arc, Cell, RefCell, Mutex

Difference Between Box, Rc, Arc, Cell (and its various variants.. RefCell, Mutex, RwLock) in Rust:

Box is for single ownership. A great use case is to use this when we want to store primitive types (stored on stack) on heap.
Rc is for multiple ownership.
Arc is for multiple ownership, but threadsafe.
RefCell is for “interior mutability”; that is, when you need to mutate something behind a &T.
Cell is for “interior mutability” for Copy types; that is, when you need to mutate something behind a &T. Cell, is similar to RefCell except that instead of giving references to the inner value, the value is copied in and out of the Cell.
Mutex, which offers interior mutability that’s safe to use across threads

A Copy type is one where all the data it logically encompasses (usually, owns) is part of its stack representation. For example int/floats are copy types. Vec and String are not copy types. Surprisingly, &T is a copy type. Below is a link post that explains this very well. It can be very confusing at first but once you get a hang of the ownership, borrowing and borrow-checking rules, it all makes sense.

Cell and its variants can be confusing. Here is an excellent post. https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/27/wrapper-types-in-rust-choosing-your-guarantees/

Here is another link post explaining the single threaded Read-Write Lock pattern implemented in Rust that makes mutability of referenced objects different from other languages. https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/17/the-problem-with-shared-mutability/

Another great link discussing interior mutability concepts is: https://ricardomartins.cc/2016/06/08/interior-mutability

Since the above are often used in conjunction with threads, here is another post that also explains how thread safety is dealt with in Rust: https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/30/how-rust-achieves-thread-safety/

A great article on Raw Pointers which are central to understanding the inner implementation of “inner mutability”. http://web.mit.edu/rust-lang_v1.25/arch/amd64_ubuntu1404/share/doc/rust/html/book/first-edition/raw-pointers.html