Ownership and Borrowing

Ownership and borrowing are fundamental concepts in Rust that ensure memory safety and prevent common programming errors. Here's a breakdown at various skill levels:

• Basic Idea:

  • Each value in Rust has a single owner.
  • The owner is responsible for the value's lifetime and deallocation (cleaning up memory).
  • When the owner goes out of scope, the value is automatically dropped (memory is released).

• Ownership and lifetimes:

  • The Rust compiler ensures that borrowed data is valid for as long as the reference is used.
  • Lifetimes (like 'static) can be specified to annotate how long a reference is valid.

• Ownership and smart pointers:

  • Explore techniques like Box and Rc (reference counting) for managing ownership in more complex scenarios.
  • Deep dive into the borrow checker and advanced ownership concepts in the Rust documentation.