McNamara T. The Accelerated Guide to Smart Pointers in Rust 2023 torrent

Textbook in PDF format

A short textbook for anyone who's interested in understanding about Rust's smart pointers, including people who don't know what smart pointers are.
About the Book
Explore the various types of smart pointers available in Rust, their use cases, and how they contribute to managing memory safely and efficiently. By reading this guide, you'll learn what smart pointers are, how to use them and how to build your own.
In some sense, they are the essence of Rust's "zero-cost abstraction" philosophy, whereby you only pay for what you use.
Smart pointers are powerful tools that provide additional functionality and guarantees compared to raw pointers. If you're unsure what a raw pointer is, that's okay, we'll discuss that too.
We'll cover the core smart pointer types in Rust, including Box<T>, Rc<T>, Arc<T>, RefCell<T>, and Mutex<T>. Each type will be thoroughly explained, accompanied by practical code examples that are linked directly in the Rust playground, so you can run them in your web browser.
Whether you are a Rust enthusiast, a curious learner, or a seasoned developer looking to enhance your memory management skills, this guide is here to support your journey. So let's dive in and unlock the power of smart pointers in Rust!
Contents
Introduction
Defining smart pointers
Ownership
Borrowing
Lifetimes
Understanding Rust
Defining smart pointers, again
Why use them?
Automatic memory management
Prevent data races
Add super powers to pointers
Simplify code
Stdlib's smart pointers
Box<T>
Rc<T>
Arc<T>
RefCell<T>
Mutex<T>
RwLock<T>
Building your own smart pointers
Drop
Deref
DerefMut
Extension topics
Cyclic data structures
Rc<T> from scratch
PhantomData<T>
Recap
Cheat sheet
Afterword
About Tim McNamara