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How does Rust handle memory safety without a garbage collector?
Asked on Feb 19, 2026
Answer
Rust ensures memory safety without a garbage collector through its ownership model, which includes rules enforced by the borrow checker at compile time. This model prevents data races, dangling pointers, and memory leaks by managing how memory is accessed and released.
Example Concept: Rust's ownership model is based on three main rules: each value in Rust has a single owner, a value is dropped when its owner goes out of scope, and references to data must obey borrowing rules. The borrow checker enforces these rules, ensuring that at any time, you can have either one mutable reference or any number of immutable references to a piece of data, but not both. This design allows Rust to manage memory safely and efficiently without needing a garbage collector.
Additional Comment:
- Ownership rules are checked at compile time, which means no runtime overhead for memory management.
- Rust's approach allows for deterministic resource management, which is crucial for systems programming.
- The borrow checker helps prevent common bugs like use-after-free and double-free errors.
- Rust's memory model is designed to be both safe and performant, making it suitable for high-performance applications.
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