Box, Rc, and Arc Smart Pointers
Understand how `Box` for heap allocation, `Rc` for shared ownership, and `Arc` for thread-safe shared ownership manage data.
What are Smart Pointers?
Rust's ownership system is great for memory safety, but sometimes you need more flexibility. That's where smart pointers come in!
Smart pointers are data structures that act like pointers but also have additional metadata and capabilities. They manage memory, ownership, and other resources automatically.
Box: Storing Data on the Heap
The simplest smart pointer is Box<T>. It allows you to store data on the heap instead of the stack.
- Stack: Fast, fixed-size data.
- Heap: Slower, flexible-size data, allocated at runtime.
When you put a value in a Box, the Box itself is on the stack, but the data it points to lives on the heap.
All lessons in this course
- Box, Rc, and Arc Smart Pointers
- Interior Mutability: RefCell, Cell
- Fearless Concurrency with Threads