Ownership and Borrowing

Rust’s ownership system is a defining feature that sets it apart in the landscape of programming languages. It enforces memory safety and concurrency guarantees at compile-time through a set of rules governing ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes. While the principle of compile-time resource management is not exclusive to Rust—other languages and systems have implemented various strategies to manage resources—the combination of ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes in Rust provides a unique approach. 

This methodology eliminates the need for a garbage collector and significantly reduces runtime overheads associated with memory management. Rust’s strict yet user-friendly enforcement of these rules at compile-time ensures memory safety and prevents a wide class of bugs, making it stand out among both managed and unmanaged programming environments.

Ownership

Ownership is a set of rules that govern how memory is managed in Rust. These rules replace the need for a garbage collector, which is essential in other programming languages.

• Each value in a Rust program has a single owner. The owner is a variable that stores the value.

• There can only be one owner for a value at a time, and values can be the same for different owners.

• The value is dropped from the memory when the owner goes out of scope.