6 Rust programming mistakes to watch out for
Rust offers programmers a way to write memory-safe software without garbage collection, running at machine-native speed. It's also a complex language to master, with a fairly steep initial learning curve. Here are five gotchas, snags, and traps to watch for when you're getting your footing with Rust—and for more seasoned Rust developers, too.
Rust gotchas: 6 things you need to know about writing Rust code
- You can't 'toggle off' the borrow checker
- Don't use '
_
' for variables you want to bind - Closures don't have the same lifetime rules as functions
- Destructors don't always run when a borrow expires
- Beware of unsafe things and unbounded lifetimes
.unwrap()
surrenders error-handling control
You can't 'toggle off' the borrow checker
Ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes are baked into Rust. They're an integral part of how the language maintains memory safety without garbage collection.