Chapter 6: Ownership and Memory Management in Rust

For C programmers, manual memory management is a fundamental aspect of programming. In C, you have complete control over memory allocation and deallocation using functions like malloc and free. While this offers flexibility, it also introduces risks such as memory leaks, dangling pointers, and buffer overflows. Rust introduces a different approach to memory management that ensures memory safety without a garbage collector and minimizes runtime overhead.

In this chapter, we'll delve into Rust's ownership system, borrowing, lifetimes, and other related topics, comparing them directly with C to help you leverage your existing knowledge. We'll also explore advanced concepts like smart pointers (Box, Rc, Arc) and touch upon unsafe Rust and interoperability with C.

We will use Rust's String type as an example to introduce ownership and borrowing. Strings represent more complex data than scalar types, and their dynamic nature helps illustrate key concepts in memory management. Here, we focus on basic string operations such as creating and appending text. A more in-depth discussion of the string type will be covered in a dedicated chapter later on.