Smart Pointers

Image made by Excalidraw

Yesterday we covered Closures, why they are important and edge cases to watch when working with them. If you missed it check the link down below.

Closures

Rust’s ownership model is its secret sauce for memory safety, but sometimes you need more flexibility than raw ownership provides.

That’s where smart pointers come in, they’re like specialized tools that extend Rust’s ownership rules to handle complex scenarios.

Unlike raw pointers (*const T or *mut T), which are unsafe and leave memory management up to you, smart pointers add safety guarantees and automatic cleanup.

They’re not just a fancy wrapper, they’re essential for writing clean, safe, and efficient code.

Let’s break down the key smart pointers in Rust—Box<T>, Rc<T>, Arc<T>, RefCell<T>, and Weak<T>—and we’ll see below how they solve problems you’re likely to encounter in actual projects.

Box<T>

Imagine you’re building a file parser for a log-processing tool at work. Your parser needs to handle a recursive data structure, like a tree of log entries where…