This is key to a lot of compiler optimizations. It is de facto in C compilers, and therefor in a lot of compiler infrastructure used by other languages. There is an attempt to make it more clearly defined in the C standard:
Is that the definition of provenance or is there a wider definition that we should know?
Sorry, this sentence is difficult to understand.
I am picky in language as well, so I understand where you are coming from. But I discovered that LLMs often answered anyway when my question was incomplete or contained mistakes and they got it correct not too rarely.
It's a useful trick I discovered late in my life (I am in my fifties). I started to use it with my children and my wife. Their utterances are often not mathematically and linguistically perfect, but very human and lovely. When I got stumped I just thought about what they might have asked and answered that. More often than not they were happy with my answer.
Who arrived when?
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.)
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.