A lifetime is some set of memory a reference may refer to. Consider:
fn foo<'a, 'b>(x: &'a str, y: &'b str) -> &'a str
Aren't 'a and 'b sets of memory a reference can refer to? As far as this function call is concerned, both 'a and 'b will live throughout, so it's not about life and death, it's about what memory the references may refer too.
Is a lifetime and a "provenance" the same thing?
Lifetimes are a static approximation of provenance. They are erased after being validated by the borrow checker, and do not exist in Miri or have any impact on what transformations the optimizer may perform. In other words, the provenance rules allow a superset of what the borrow checker allows.
Speaking of Miri, is the long term goal to say for certain whether or not a program execution encountered UB? (Which is, of course, different than verifying it before execution at compile time.)
As I understand it, Miri would like to be certain about the presence/absence of the UB of any particular program execution, but there will probably always be some cases it can't catch.
That's more than a long term goal, that's the present behavior, to the extent that the UB rules are defined in the first place. Miri will tell you when it has to make approximating assumptions (e.g. accessing FFI or using nondeterministic operations), and it doesn't happen very often. This is very much the intent of the tool.
No, the set of memory the reference refers to is encoded by the reference's bits. Two references with the same lifetime can refer to different memory, and vice-versa. Lifetimes determine when the reference is valid.
Strictly speaking, a pointer points to 1 address, not a set.
Abstractly speaking, a lifetime represents a set of memory that lives a certain length of time, and thus also represents the set of memory a reference with that lifetime can reference.
It's just a different way of thinking about lifetimes which helped me understand them.
Rust "fat pointers" like `&str` contain a length as well.
> represents the set of memory a reference with that lifetime can reference.
No, you can have memory that is alive for a particular lifetime but that you are not allowed to access via a pointer with said lifetime (because it's out of bounds).