memory-management
3 free lessons tagged memory-management across Programming. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
Unsafe, and Where the Guarantee Actually Ends
The borrow checker rejects some correct programs, so Rust provides ways out: runtime-checked cells, reference counting, and unsafe blocks. This lesson covers what each escape hatch turns off, what it does not, and the encapsulation discipline that keeps a small unsafe core from voiding the guarantee for everything above it.
Borrowing: Aliasing XOR Mutation
Moving a value to read it is unusable, so ownership needs a way to lend. The lending rule is one line, and it is the reason Rust can guarantee no dangling references: you may have many readers or one writer, never both. This lesson builds that rule and the lifetimes that enforce it across function boundaries.
Ownership: One Rule That Replaces the Garbage Collector
Every language must decide who frees memory and when. Rust answers with a rule enforced at compile time: each value has exactly one owner, and it is freed when that owner goes out of scope. This lesson builds the rule, shows what moving a value means, and explains what the approach buys and charges.