Compile Time Guarantees

Static memory management at compile time:

  • No uninitialized variables.
  • No memory leaks (mostly, see notes).
  • No double-frees.
  • No use-after-free.
  • No NULL pointers.
  • No forgotten locked mutexes.
  • No data races between threads.
  • No iterator invalidation.

It is possible to produce memory leaks in (safe) Rust. Some examples are:

  • You can for use Box::leak to leak a pointer. A use of this could be to get runtime-initialized and runtime-sized static variables
  • You can use std::mem::forget to make the compiler “forget” about a value (meaning the destructor is never run).
  • You can also accidentally create a reference cycle with Rc or Arc.
  • In fact, some will consider infinitely populating a collection a memory leak and Rust does not protect from those.

For the purpose of this course, “No memory leaks” should be understood as “Pretty much no accidental memory leaks”.