How does Rust handle memory safety without a garbage collector?

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How does Rust handle memory safety without a garbage collector?

Asked on Dec 31, 2025

Answer

Rust ensures memory safety without a garbage collector through its ownership system, which is enforced at compile time. This system uses rules about ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes to manage memory allocation and deallocation, preventing common issues like null pointer dereferencing and data races.

Example Concept: Rust's ownership model assigns a single owner to each piece of data, and when the owner goes out of scope, the data is automatically deallocated. Borrowing allows references to data without transferring ownership, and the borrow checker ensures that references do not outlive the data they point to, maintaining memory safety and preventing data races.

Additional Comment:

Ownership rules ensure that each value has a single owner, preventing double frees.
Borrowing allows for either mutable or immutable references, but not both simultaneously, ensuring safe concurrency.
Lifetimes are used to track how long references are valid, preventing dangling references.
Rust's compiler checks these rules at compile time, eliminating runtime overhead associated with garbage collection.

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