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

Chapter 5. Memory Management and Safety

Memory management is a fundamental concept to understand for anyone working with a low-level programming language. Low-level languages don't come with automatic memory reclamation solutions like a built-in garbage collector, and it's the responsibility of the programmer to manage memory that's used by the program. Having knowledge of where and how memory gets used in a program enables programmers to build efficient and safe software systems. A lot of bugs in low-level software are due to improper handling of memory. At times, it's the programmer's mistake. The other times, it's the side effect of the programming language used, such as C and C++, which are infamous for a lot of memory vulnerability reports in software. Rust offers a better, compile-time solution to memory management. It makes it hard to write software that leaks memory unless you explicitly intend to! Programmers who have done a fair amount of development with Rust eventually come to...