Book Image

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide

By : Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta, Claus Matzinger
Book Image

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide

By: Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta, Claus Matzinger

Overview of this book

Rust is a powerful language with a rare combination of safety, speed, and zero-cost abstractions. This Learning Path is filled with clear and simple explanations of its features along with real-world examples, demonstrating how you can build robust, scalable, and reliable programs. You’ll get started with an introduction to Rust data structures, algorithms, and essential language constructs. Next, you will understand how to store data using linked lists, arrays, stacks, and queues. You’ll also learn to implement sorting and searching algorithms, such as Brute Force algorithms, Greedy algorithms, Dynamic Programming, and Backtracking. As you progress, you’ll pick up on using Rust for systems programming, network programming, and the web. You’ll then move on to discover a variety of techniques, right from writing memory-safe code, to building idiomatic Rust libraries, and even advanced macros. By the end of this Learning Path, you’ll be able to implement Rust for enterprise projects, writing better tests and documentation, designing for performance, and creating idiomatic Rust code. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Mastering Rust - Second Edition by Rahul Sharma and Vesa Kaihlavirta • Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust by Claus Matzinger
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Approaches to memory allocation


At runtime, memory allocations in a process happens either on the stack or on the heap. They are storage locations that are used to store values during the execution of the program. In this section, we'll take a look at both of these allocation approaches.

The stack is used for short-lived values whose sizes are known as compile time, and is the ideal storage location for function calls and their associated context, which needs to go away once the function returns. The heap is for anything that needs to live beyond function calls. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Rust, Rust prefers stack allocation by default. Any value or instance of a type that you create and bind to a variable gets stored on the stack by default. Storing on the heap is explicit and is done by using smart pointer types, which are explained later in this chapter.

The stack

Any time we call a function or a method, the stack is used for allocating space for values that are created...