Rust for C-Programmers

2.12 Memory Safety and Ownership

While not deeply covered in this chapter, it's essential to recognize that Rust's ownership model ensures memory safety without a garbage collector.

• Ownership: Each value in Rust has a variable that's its owner.
• Borrowing: References allow you to borrow data without taking ownership.
• No Null: Rust does not have null pointers; instead, it uses Option<T> to represent optional values.

2.12.1 Comparison with C

• C requires manual memory management with malloc and free.
• Null pointers can lead to segmentation faults.
• Rust prevents common errors like use-after-free and null dereferencing at compile time.