1. 1. Introduction
  2. 2. Meet Safe and Unsafe
    1. 2.1. How Safe and Unsafe Interact
    2. 2.2. Working with Unsafe
  3. 3. Data Layout
    1. 3.1. repr(Rust)
    2. 3.2. Exotically Sized Types
    3. 3.3. Other reprs
  4. 4. Ownership
    1. 4.1. References
    2. 4.2. Lifetimes
    3. 4.3. Limits of Lifetimes
    4. 4.4. Lifetime Elision
    5. 4.5. Unbounded Lifetimes
    6. 4.6. Higher-Rank Trait Bounds
    7. 4.7. Subtyping and Variance
    8. 4.8. Drop Check
    9. 4.9. PhantomData
    10. 4.10. Splitting Borrows
  5. 5. Type Conversions
    1. 5.1. Coercions
    2. 5.2. The Dot Operator
    3. 5.3. Casts
    4. 5.4. Transmutes
  6. 6. Uninitialized Memory
    1. 6.1. Checked
    2. 6.2. Drop Flags
    3. 6.3. Unchecked
  7. 7. Ownership Based Resource Management
    1. 7.1. Constructors
    2. 7.2. Destructors
    3. 7.3. Leaking
  8. 8. Unwinding
    1. 8.1. Exception Safety
    2. 8.2. Poisoning
  9. 9. Concurrency
    1. 9.1. Races
    2. 9.2. Send and Sync
    3. 9.3. Atomics
  10. 10. Implementing Vec
    1. 10.1. Layout
    2. 10.2. Allocating
    3. 10.3. Push and Pop
    4. 10.4. Deallocating
    5. 10.5. Deref
    6. 10.6. Insert and Remove
    7. 10.7. IntoIter
    8. 10.8. RawVec
    9. 10.9. Drain
    10. 10.10. Handling Zero-Sized Types
    11. 10.11. Final Code
  11. 11. Implementing Arc and Mutex

Working With Uninitialized Memory

All runtime-allocated memory in a Rust program begins its life as uninitialized. In this state the value of the memory is an indeterminate pile of bits that may or may not even reflect a valid state for the type that is supposed to inhabit that location of memory. Attempting to interpret this memory as a value of any type will cause Undefined Behavior. Do Not Do This.

Rust provides mechanisms to work with uninitialized memory in checked (safe) and unchecked (unsafe) ways.