A system programming language needs to match hardware where mutability is associated with memory addresses, something functional languages can afford to abstract away.

> So from that perspective, interior mutability is a form of rebinding

really? i honestly dont have _too_ much experience with functional languages, basically only elixir and consequently some amount of erlang in that vain... but i'd feel like thats not the same? but it may be that my point of view is too narrow.

from my experience with that functional language, the equivalent to this scenario would be a struct - and wherever i can mutate properties within it -- or need to reconstruct the struct from scratch.

both have technical consequences, eg if i passed the struct into a consumer somewhere which keeps it, it would get the "modified" version automatically when the property was changed

but on reconstruction, it'd have to introduce some kind of event listener to handle the reconstruction.

simple example for such a scenario would be eg a session within a SSE api. the mutated struct would trivially allow for an uninterrupted stream no matter how long the session is extended, the latter needs to pay attention so its not opening a memory leak to support that feature.