Ownership

  • What Is Ownership?

    • Ownership in simple terms means to have possession of something.
    • Let’s look at a real-life analogy to explain this concept. If something belongs to you, you say “It’s mine”.

    • Similarly, in Rust, variable bindings can have ownership of what they are bound to.

Three Rules of Ownership

The following are three rules of ownership:

Rule 1

Each value has a variable binding called its owner.

Rule 2

There can only be one owner at a time.

Rule 3

  • When an owner goes out of scope, it does not remain accessible.
    • When the variable goes out of scope, Rust calls function drop automatically at the closing curly bracket (to deallocate the memory). 
fn main() {

 let a = 1; // variable a is the owner of the value 1

 let b = 1; // variable b is the owner of the value 1

 let c = 3; // variable c is the owner of the value 3



 println!("a : {}", a);

 println!("b : {}", b);

 println!("c : {}", c);

}// value a, b, c are out of scope outside this block

output

a : 1
b : 1
c : 3
  • When using the assignment, two situations happen:
    • The value gets copied
    • The value gets moved
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Last updated a year ago. history