Chapter 3 - The fundamentals of memory management and memory safety

In this chapter, we will start to dive deep into systems programming and will study the hardware resource memory. We will learn how memory is managed, both at the level of the operating system as well as on the level of a systems programming language. In this process, we will learn what tools the Rust programming language provides developers to make best use of memory in their code. Here is the roadmap for this chapter:

• 3.1. Types of memory in a typical computer
• 3.2. How the operating system manages memory
• 3.3. Memory management in Rust - The basics of lifetimes and ownership
  • 3.3.1. The address space of a process
  • 3.3.2. The Stack
  • 3.3.3. The Heap
  • 3.3.4. Memory management basics
  • 3.3.5. A first glimpse of memory ownership and lifetimes
  • 3.3.6. Rust and move semantics
  • 3.3.7. Copying values
  • 3.3.8. Borrows in Rust
  • 3.3.9. Mutability and the rule of one
  • 3.3.10. Summary
• 3.4. Smart pointers and reference counting
• 3.5. A first look at unsafe Rust
  • 3.5.1. The motivation for unsafe Rust based on the example of uninitialized memory
  • 3.5.2. Interfacing with C functions
  • 3.5.3. A case study on unsafe code using the heapless crate