In Rust document, Cell is “A mutable memory location”, and RefCell is “A mutable memory location with dynamically checked borrow rules”.

They both provide “interior mutability”, where you can modify the value stored in cell via immutable reference of the cell.

They both have an API get_mut to return a mutable reference to the underlying data. This method requires a mutable reference to the cell, which guarantees that the callee has exclusive ownership of the cell.

pub fn get_mut(&mut self) -> &mut T

The difference is how they implement interior mutability. Cell copies or moves contained value, while RefCell allows both mutable and immutable reference borrowing. I will try to explain the difference via their APIs in this article.

Cell

In the old version of Rust, Cell requires the wrapped type to be Copy. Many articles still contain such outdated and misleading information. Indeed Cell has two different sets of APIs in a newer version.

The first set is the Copy API. It requires a Copy wrapper, and contains methods get and set. The method get returns a copy of the contained value, and set stores a copy of the argument val as the new value.

// impl<T: Copy> Cell<T>
pub fn get(&self) -> T

// impl<T> Cell<T>
pub fn set(&self, val: T)

Another set is the Move API. It has two methods take and set. The method take moves out the contained value, leaving Default::default() in its place. The call set also works for non-copyable type, where it moves the argument into the cell.

// impl<T: Default> Cell<T>
pub fn take(&self) -> T

// impl<T> Cell<T>
pub fn set(&self, val: T)

The method replace is an alternative of take, when T does not implement Default or the new value is known in advance when taking the value.

// impl<T> Cell<T>
pub fn replace(&self, val: T) -> T

An important property of Cell is that the cell cannot tell you what’s contained in the cell via a reference. You either copy the contained value, or modify the cell and move out the value.

RefCell

RefCell allows borrowing immutable or mutable reference to the contained value. It tracks the borrows at runtime, via borrow and borrow_mut.

pub fn borrow(&self) -> Ref<T>
pub fn borrow_mut(&self) -> RefMut<T>

The method borrow grants temporary access to the contained value via immutable reference. Multiple immutable borrows can be taken out at the same time. It panics if the value is currently mutably borrowed.

The API borrow_mut mutably borrows the wrapped value. It panics if the value is currently borrowed, either mutably or immutably.

The runtime tracking certainly has overheads, and RefCell also can lead to runtime panics.