Dear #RustLang people: How would you explain lifetimes to someone that is new to #rust and #programming? Is there any material aimed to teach this in simple ways?
Edit: Outside of the Rust book. This is not for me, I am teaching Rust for others and looking for alternative ways of explaining.
@deavid I think that the best way to understand borrowing and lifetimes is in terms of stack allocation.
Basically, every function allocates memory for its variables on the stack; that memory is freed once the function exits. So other functions can use that memory by reference so long as they're callees of that first function.
If you want to store something on the heap, the *reference* to that thing is stored as a smart pointer on the stack (Box, etc) that deallocates the heap memory when it goes out of scope.
And, you can explicitly give your callee the responsibility of freeing some referenced memory by passing them the associated variable as an owned value.
@deavid Maybe this also helps?
Lifetime annotations: why doesn't Rust? - by @mtomassoli
David Martínez Martí
hoodie
Ivan Enderlin 🦀
Erik C. Thauvin
Kris Nuttycombe
Guy Sherman
jameison
Jan 
