Rust for C-Programmers

2.13 Memory Safety and Ownership

Rust’s ownership and borrowing rules ensure safety without requiring a garbage collector:

• Ownership: Each value has a single owner.
• Borrowing: References let you read or modify values without taking ownership.
• No Null: Rust does not allow “null” references; optional data is handled via Option<T>.

2.13.1 Comparison with C

In C, manual allocation and deallocation (malloc, free) can cause memory leaks or invalid pointer references. Rust prevents many of these issues through compile-time checks enforced by its ownership model.