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Understanding Rust’s memory ownership, references, borrowing and lifetimes
Learning about how Rust manages memory
Originally published at https://fek.io on November 7, 2026.
I am starting to learn the Rust programming language. There are many reasons why I have decided to learn Rust. I try to learn a new programming language once a year, even if I am not going to use that language.
I am also learning Rust because it is being used in more and more projects for speed. When you write your code in Rust, you can compile it to run natively on just about any processor and operating system. Many projects in the Node.js ecosystem have been rewritten to run in Rust, including Vite and Turbopack. Bun was recently rewritten to run in Rust.
Rust is even being used in the Linux kernel, and in Windows.
I have used other native languages like C, Swift and Objective-C, but Rust has some features that make it unique when it comes to the way it handles memory. Most programming languages either force you to do your own memory management or have a runtime that uses a GC (garbage collection). I have used languages that have a garbage collector before, and they are nice because you don’t necessarily have to do your own memory management. Garbage collection systems are not perfect, and can offer drawbacks. The JVM…
