Trifecta of memory safety

The concepts that we will explore next are the core tenets of Rust's memory safety and its zero cost abstraction principle. They enable Rust to detect memory safety violations in a program at compile time, provide automatic freeing of resources when their scope ends, and much more. We call these concepts ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes. Ownership is kind of like the core principle, while borrowing and lifetimes are type system extensions to the language, enforcing and sometimes relaxing the ownership principle in different contexts in code to ensure compile-time memory management. Let's elaborate on these ideas.

Ownership

The notion of a true owner of a resource in a program differs across languages. Here, by resource, we collectively refer to any variable holding a value on the heap or the stack, or a variable holding an open file descriptor, a database connection socket, a network socket, and similar things. All of them occupy some memory from the time they...