Understanding Rust Ownership: A Guide to Memory Management

What is Ownership

In JavaScript, memory management is typically handled through garbage collection, utilizing approaches like mark and sweep, reference counting, and optimizations for new and old generations.

All programming languages require memory management. For instance, JavaScript and Java use garbage collection mechanisms, while C and C++ involve manual memory allocation and deallocation. C++ further employs the RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) principle, managing memory in constructors and destructors. Rust, on the other hand, introduces a unique approach called ownership: it utilizes a ownership system with specific rules, allowing the compiler to perform checks during compilation without incurring runtime overhead.

In simpler terms, Rust follows a set of rules that determine the ownership of variables in your code once you’ve finished writing it — deciding who has ownership and whether it has been released.

Ownership Rules

• Every value in Rust has a corresponding variable that is its owner.
• At any given time, a value has at most one owner.
• When the owner goes out of scope, the value it owns will be released.

To break it down, for every value in the heap or stack (generally, basic types and easily determinable values occupy the stack, while values with indeterminate sizes, like tuples, are…