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The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition
book

The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition

by Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols
February 2023
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
560 pages
14h 34m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition

15 Smart Pointers

A pointer is a general concept for a variable that contains an address in memory. This address refers to, or “points at,” some other data. The most common kind of pointer in Rust is a reference, which you learned about in Chapter 4. References are indicated by the & symbol and borrow the value they point to. They don’t have any special capabilities other than referring to data, and they have no overhead.

Smart pointers, on the other hand, are data structures that act like a pointer but also have additional metadata and capabilities. The concept of smart pointers isn’t unique to Rust: smart pointers originated in C++ and ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781098156817