What’s inside a Box<T>? Let’s build one and find out

A detailed tutorial on Rust’s memory management system, the ownership system, pointers, and interfacing with the operating system.

Tim begins the tutorial with a discussion about the Rust “Nomicon” and the Send and Sync traits. He then moves on to an example of implementing the Box&ltT> type in Rust. The video covers how to allocate memory using the posix_memalign function from the C standard library and available to Rust via the libc crate, and how to handle potential errors from this function.

Tim then discusses the use of the unsafe keyword in Rust, explaining that it allows you to perform operations that the Rust compiler can’t guarantee are safe, such as directly accessing memory. He emphasizes the importance of using `unsafe` responsibly and only when necessary.

The video then delves into the topic of pointers, with Tim explaining how they work and how to use them in Rust. He demonstrates how to write a value to a memory address that has been allocated.

Tim also discusses the concept of ownership in Rust, explaining how it helps prevent common programming errors like null pointer dereferencing and double free errors. He shows how to use the Deref and DerefMut traits to access data through a pointer. Tim demonstrates how to use the `Box` type in Rust, explaining that it’s a way to store data on the heap rather than the stack. He shows how to create a `Box`, put data into it, and then retrieve the data.

The video concludes with Tim encouraging viewers to explore more advanced Rust topics and documentation. He emphasizes that learning these topics can be challenging but rewarding, and can help viewers become better Rust programmers.