🎯 Moving Variables in Rust
Em poucas palavras
Definição técnica ou simplificada do conceito.
📝 Notas e Desenvolvimento
In the case of a string literal, we know the contents at compile time, so the text is hardcoded directly into the final executable. This is why string literals are fast and efficient. But these properties only come from the string literal’s immutability. Unfortunately, we can’t put a blob of memory into the binary for each piece of text whose size is unknown at compile time and whose size might change while running the program.
With the String type, in order to support a mutable, growable piece of text, we need to allocate an amount of memory on the heap, unknown at compile time, to hold the contents. This means:
- The memory must be requested from the memory allocator at runtime.
- We need a way of returning this memory to the allocator when we’re done with our
String.
That first part is done by us: when we call String::from, its implementation requests the memory it needs. This is pretty much universal in programming languages.
However, the second part is different. In languages with a garbage collector (GC), the GC keeps track of and cleans up memory that isn’t being used anymore, and we don’t need to think about it. In most languages without a GC, it’s our responsibility to identify when memory is no longer being used and to call code to explicitly free it, just as we did to request it. Doing this correctly has historically been a difficult programming problem. If we forget, we’ll waste memory. If we do it too early, we’ll have an invalid variable. If we do it twice, that’s a bug too. We need to pair exactly one allocate with exactly one free.
Rust takes a different path: the memory is automatically returned once the variable that owns it goes out of scope. Here’s a version of our scope example from Listing 4-1 using a String instead of a string literal:
fn main() {
{
let s = String::from("hello"); // s is valid from this point forward
// do stuff with s
} // this scope is now over, and s is no
// longer valid
}There is a natural point at which we can return the memory our String needs to the allocator: when s goes out of scope. When a variable goes out of scope, Rust calls a special function for us. This function is called drop, and it’s where the author of String can put the code to return the memory. Rust calls drop automatically at the closing curly bracket.
Note: In C++, this pattern of deallocating resources at the end of an item’s lifetime is sometimes called Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII). The drop function in Rust will be familiar to you if you’ve used RAII patterns.
This pattern has a profound impact on the way Rust code is written. It may seem simple right now, but the behavior of code can be unexpected in more complicated situations when we want to have multiple variables use the data we’ve allocated on the heap. Let’s explore some of those situations now.
Multiple variables can interact with the same data in different ways in Rust. Let’s look at an example using an integer in Listing 4-2.
fn main() {
let x = 5;
let y = x;
}We can probably guess what this is doing: “bind the value 5 to x; then make a copy of the value in x and bind it to y.” We now have two variables, x and y, and both equal 5. This is indeed what is happening, because integers are simple values with a known, fixed size, and these two 5 values are pushed onto the stack.
Now let’s look at the String version:
fn main() {
let s1 = String::from("hello");
let s2 = s1;
}This looks very similar, so we might assume that the way it works would be the same: that is, the second line would make a copy of the value in s1 and bind it to s2. But this isn’t quite what happens.
Take a look at Figure 4-1 to see what is happening to String under the covers. A String is made up of three parts, shown on the left: a pointer to the memory that holds the contents of the string, a length, and a capacity. This group of data is stored on the stack. On the right is the memory on the heap that holds the contents.
Figure: Two tables: the first table contains the representation of s1 on the stack, consisting of its length (5), capacity (5), and a pointer to the first value in the second table. The second table contains the representation of the string data on the heap, byte by byte..Representation in memory of a String holding the value "hello" bound to s1
The length is how much memory, in bytes, the contents of the String are currently using. The capacity is the total amount of memory, in bytes, that the String has received from the allocator. The difference between length and capacity matters, but not in this context, so for now, it’s fine to ignore the capacity.
When we assign s1 to s2, the String data is copied, meaning we copy the pointer, the length, and the capacity that are on the stack. We do not copy the data on the heap that the pointer refers to. In other words, the data representation in memory looks like Figure 4-2.
Figure 4-2: Representation in memory of the variable s2 that has a copy of the pointer, length, and capacity of s1
The representation does not look like Figure 4-3, which is what memory would look like if Rust instead copied the heap data as well. If Rust did this, the operation s2 = s1 could be very expensive in terms of runtime performance if the data on the heap were large.
Figure: Four tables: two tables representing the stack data for s1 and s2,and each points to its own copy of string data on the heap. Another possibility for what s2 = s1 might do if Rust copied the heap data as well
Earlier, we said that when a variable goes out of scope, Rust automatically calls the drop function and cleans up the heap memory for that variable. But Figure 4-2 shows both data pointers pointing to the same location. This is a problem: when s2 and s1 go out of scope, they will both try to free the same memory. This is known as a double free error and is one of the memory safety bugs we mentioned previously. Freeing memory twice can lead to memory corruption, which can potentially lead to security vulnerabilities.
To ensure memory safety, after the line let s2 = s1;, Rust considers s1 as no longer valid. Therefore, Rust doesn’t need to free anything when s1 goes out of scope. Check out what happens when you try to use s1 after s2 is created; it won’t work:
If you’ve heard the terms shallow copy and deep copy while working with other languages, the concept of copying the pointer, length, and capacity without copying the data probably sounds like making a shallow copy. But because Rust also invalidates the first variable, instead of being called a shallow copy, it’s known as a move. In this example, we would say that s1 was moved into s2. So, what actually happens is shown in Figure 4-4.
Figure 4-4: Representation in memory after s1 has been invalidated
That solves our problem! With only s2 valid, when it goes out of scope it alone will free the memory, and we’re done.
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