alt Hacker NewsYou cannot return an immutable version. You can return it owned (in which case you can assign/reassign it to a mut variable at any point) or you can take a mut reference and return an immutable reference - but whoever is the owner can almost always access it mutably.
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tekne • last Thursday at 9:45 PM
I mean, if you return an immutable reference, the owner in fact cannot mutate it until that reference is dropped.
If you in fact return e.g. an Rc::new(thing) or Arc::new(thing), that's forever (though of course you can unwrap the last reference!)
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Arg, you’re right. Not sure what I was thinking there. I still think my point stands, because you get the benefits of immutability, but yeah, I didn’t explain it well.