Over the weekend, I was working on a personal Rust project when I ran into an excessive memory usage problem. After an evening of trial and error, I found a workaround to fix the memory usage, but I still didn’t understand how the issue was even possible, so I then spent another evening digging through the source code of the Rust standard library to understand the root cause.

… the story of how I identified the bug …

  • TehPers@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    For shared, immutable lists, you can also use Arc/Rc in place of Box! I guess what’s surprising is that [T] (and str/Path/OsStr/etc) are traditionally associated with shared borrows (like &[T]), but they’re really just unsized types that can be used anywhere there’s a ?Sized bound.

    Also, overuse of lists (as opposed to other data structures) seems to be a common problem in all programming languages among less experienced devs since they’re simple enough to use in most places. Not saying that’s what happened to the author though - these types are way less obvious than something like a hash set or queue.