The Rust Programming Language

The Rust Programming Language — Lifetime — Lifetime, Lifetime Annotations, Lifetime Elision and Static Lifetime

Diving very deep into Lifetimes! Understand how Rust’s Memory Management System works.

Lifetime:

A lifetime is the period starting from when a variable is allocated and de-allocated from the memory. Refer the below diagram:

Lifetime of a variable

This is the last topic in this series which emphasises on how Rust’s Memory Management System works. We’ll start with below code snippet:

struct Releases {
    years: &[i64],
    eighties: &[i64],
    nineties: &[i64],
}

fn main() {
    let years: Vec<i64> = vec![1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 2004, 2006];
    
    let eighties: &[i64] = &years[0..2];
    let nineties: &[i64] = &years[2..4];
}

The code snippet is fairly simple. We have a years vector and eighties and nineties references from the years vector. We also have a struct Releases which has years, eighties, and nineties as the members of the struct which are also nothing but the reference of the memory where years is stored in the heap.