How does Rust ensure memory safety without a garbage collector?

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How does Rust ensure memory safety without a garbage collector?

Asked on Dec 04, 2025

Answer

Rust ensures memory safety without a garbage collector by using a strict ownership model enforced at compile time. This model is based on the concepts of ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes, which the Rust compiler checks to prevent data races, dangling pointers, and memory leaks.

Example Concept: Rust's ownership model requires each piece of data to have a single owner at any given time. When data is passed around, ownership can be transferred (moved) or temporarily borrowed. The borrow checker enforces rules to ensure that while data is borrowed, it cannot be modified or deallocated, preventing common memory safety issues like use-after-free. Lifetimes are used to track how long references to data are valid, ensuring that references do not outlive the data they point to.

Additional Comment:

Rust's ownership and borrowing rules are checked at compile time, meaning no runtime overhead is incurred.
The borrow checker ensures that mutable references are exclusive, preventing data races in concurrent programs.
Rust's memory safety guarantees make it suitable for systems programming where performance and safety are critical.
Understanding lifetimes can be challenging initially, but they are crucial for ensuring safe memory access.

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