Smart-Pointers Archives - Binary Musings

Rust Smart Pointers Guide: Box, Cow & MutexGuard Explained

November 9, 2025November 1, 2025 by Garry Chen 101

Data Structures with Smart Pointers in Rust

Deep dive into Rust smart pointers covering Box for heap memory allocation, Cow<'a, B> for copy-on-write optimization, and MutexGuard for thread-safe resource management. Learn how smart pointers implement Deref, DerefMut, and Drop traits to provide automatic memory management and resource cleanup. Includes practical examples of custom allocators, URL parsing optimization, and building your own MyString smart pointer for efficient small string storage.

Rust Rc, Arc, RefCell: Shared Ownership & Concurrency

November 9, 2025August 11, 2025 by Garry Chen 101

Master Rust’s shared ownership and runtime checks. Use Rc/Arc for multiple owners, RefCell for interior mutability, and Mutex/RwLock for thread-safe state. Includes a DAG example and a clear look at Box::leak, plus when to prefer static checks vs dynamic checks.

C++ Smart Pointers Tutorial: Build Custom Implementation

November 9, 2025June 13, 2025 by Garry Chen 101

Build smart pointers from scratch in C++ – learn templates, move semantics, reference counting, and RAII patterns for memory management.