Rust

It is believed that it is impossible to leak memory with Rust, that is not true. Although is way more difficult to leak memory in Rust than in other languages, it can happen, sometimes by accident, and sometimes, by design. In this article we will explore some cases where leaking memory is useful. Sharing memory between threads Imagine that you have a value that it does not change and needs to be shared across several threads. If the value can be initialized with constant functions or values, you can use the static keyword. But what if the value to be shared is not constant? What are the options? ...

A while ago, I published an app that I originally made for myself but thought it would be useful for others: Kindly RSS Reader. Kindly RSS Reader is a self-hosted RSS aggregator designed for e-ink devices and optimized for low-end computers such as the Raspberry Pi. In fact, I run it on a Raspberry Pi 3B powered by a USB port. The only way to deploy it at the moment is via Docker (or compiling the source and running it by manually). I’ve uploaded the image in Docker Hub. In the future, I plan to create a .deb package and other formats to make deployment more flexible. ...

Having a language that does a lot of checks at compile time is not free, it will impact compilation times. Luckily there are some things we can do to speed things up: Dynamic linking, be careful with code generation and caching dependencies. Dynamic linking is a somewhat difficult thing to achieve in Rust but not impossible. The main reason is that at the time of writing this (Sept-Oct 2024) Rust does not have its own stable ABI and it must rely on the C binary representation (if we want to inter-operate with other languages or other Rust versions). This has some interesting consequences that we will explore in this post. ...

Now it is time to talk about references and borrowing. To understand this topic, first check out this post where I talk about ownership and move semantics. As we have seen in the named article, the way Rust manages memory allocations is rather unique. This is also true when we talk about referencing some place in the memory, something that can be achieved in C with pointers. GDB In this post I am going to explore what is happening in memory using the GNU Debugger (gdb) with the special command rust-gdb: ...

Ownership and move semantics is one of the things that makes Rust unique. To understand this topic, you need to understand what Stack and Heap are at a basic level. I wrote a post about that! You can check it out if you need a refresher on those concepts. It is a little bit hard to get used to this feature because it forces you to think about stuff that you didn’t have to worry about in other languages. Enough introduction, let’s cut to the chase! ...

Why write about Stack and Heap when there are already a lot of articles out there? I want to improve my writing skills so, I decided to write articles about things I find interesting. This article was supposed to be about how Rust manages memory through ownership. Then I thought “I should first write about Stack and Heap”. So, here we are). To understand memory management first, we need to understand what the Stack and the Heap are. Stack and Heap are memory regions used by a process to store and read values. The memory of a running process can usually be divided in the following four regions: ...