Summary

In this chapter, we looked in depth at the memory layout of a standard process in the Linux environment, and then the memory layout of a Rust program. We compared the memory management lifecycle in different programming languages and how Rust takes a different approach to memory management. We learned how memory is allocated, manipulated, and released in a Rust program, and looked at the rules governing memory management in Rust, including ownership and reference rules. We looked at the different types of memory safety issues and how Rust prevents them from using its ownership model, lifetimes, reference rules, and borrow checker.

We then returned to our template engine implementation example from Chapter03 and added a couple of features to the template engine. We achieved this by converting a static data structure into a dynamic data structure and learned how memory is allocated dynamically. Dynamic data structures are very useful in programs that deal with external inputs...