Mastering Rust - Second Edition

Memory management pitfalls

In languages with a GC, dealing with memory is abstracted away from the programmer. You declare and use the variables in your code, and how they get deallocated is an implementation detail you don't have to worry about. A low-level system programming language such as C/C++, on the other hand, does nothing to hide these details from the programmer, and provides nearly no safety. Here, programmers are given the responsibility of deallocating memory via manual free calls. Now, if we look at the majority of Common Vulnerabilities & Exposure (CVEs) in software related to memory management, it shows that we humans are not very good at this! Programmers can easily create hard-to-debug errors by allocating and deallocating ...