On November 18 of 2025 a large part of the Internet suddenly cried out and went silent, as Cloudflare’s infrastructure suffered the software equivalent of a cardiac arrest. After much panicke…
You can leak memory in perfectly safe Rust, because it is not a bug per se, an example is by using Box::leak
Preventing memory leaks was never in the intentions of Rust. What it tries to safeguard you from are Memory Safety bugs like the infamous and common double free.
And it still cleans up once the ownership model indicates it can be cleaned up. That does not ensure memory is never leaked, but it is equivalent to destructors running automatically when using unique ptr or shared ptr without cycles in C++, which avoids at least a portion of possible memory leaks.
Some memory leaks are logic errors, and this is honestly the irony of modern dynamic languages. I have actually gotten into the argument in interviews before - it is arguably safer (and better) to work from maximal static memory allocations with memory safe data objects than it is to implement dynamic memory algorithms just because they are fun coding problems.
But at least it wasn’t a memory leak!!! 😭😭😭
Memory leaks are logic errors, Rust can’t really prevent you from leaking memory.
It’s really hard to do without Rc (or similar) or unsafe.
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You can leak memory in perfectly safe Rust, because it is not a bug per se, an example is by using Box::leak
Preventing memory leaks was never in the intentions of Rust. What it tries to safeguard you from are Memory Safety bugs like the infamous and common double free.
And it still cleans up once the ownership model indicates it can be cleaned up. That does not ensure memory is never leaked, but it is equivalent to destructors running automatically when using unique ptr or shared ptr without cycles in C++, which avoids at least a portion of possible memory leaks.
Some memory leaks are logic errors, and this is honestly the irony of modern dynamic languages. I have actually gotten into the argument in interviews before - it is arguably safer (and better) to work from maximal static memory allocations with memory safe data objects than it is to implement dynamic memory algorithms just because they are fun coding problems.