Rust Ownership

Apr 3, 2023

• Each value in Rust has an owner.
• There can only be one owner at a time.
• When the owner goes out of scope, the value will be dropped.

Rust has a special annotation called the Copy trait that we can place on types that are stored on the stack, as integers are. If a type implements the Copy trait, variables that use it do not move, but rather are trivially copied, making them still valid after assignment to another variable.

So what types implement the Copy trait? You can check the documentation for the given type to be sure, but as a general rule, any group of simple scalar values can implement Copy, and nothing that requires allocation or is some form of resource can implement Copy. Here are some of the types that implement Copy:

• All the integer types, such as u32.
• The Boolean type, bool, with values true and false.
• All the floating point types, such as f64.
• The character type, char.
• Tuples, if they only contain types that also implement Copy. For example, (i32, i32) implements Copy, but (i32, String) does not.

A data race is similar to a race condition and happens when these three behaviors occur:

• Two or more pointers access the same data at the same time.
• At least one of the pointers is being used to write to the data.
• There’s no mechanism being used to synchronize access to the data.

• Rust Lifetime