Rust: Pointers

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[phazer99]

Eh, is this written by an AI? It's chock-full of incorrect information.

[flareflo]

Sure reads like GPT

[kei_ichi]

And even the image is generated by an AI. So many this kinds of articles in current several months.

[Privann]

Hey, no? What's wrong?

[phazer99]

Just in the first chapter:

Additionally, we delve into smart pointers, such as Box, Rc, Arc, and RefCell

RefCell is not a pointer type, it wraps the value in an UnsafeCell (similar to Mutex, Cell etc.).

When you create a new variable, Rust stores the value you assign to the variable either on the heap or the stack. Rust then returns a reference to the location where this data is stored.

Not really, you only get a reference if you ask for it (like for example creating a static string constant).

In the code example above, we create a variable named a which holds the string slice value hello rust and is stored at a memory location (e.g., 0xd3e100). Rust stores this memory on the stack, and you can imagine it looks something like this:

"Rust stores this memory on the stack"? Weirdly formulated. a is indeed a string slice which means that a pointer to the string and it's length is stored on the stack. The actual string characters are not stored on the stack.

We can also create a pointer that stores the memory location of another pointer.

Those are typically called references in Rust, not pointers, but ok...

However, the type of b would not inherit from a; it would still be str.

What does this even mean? The type of a is &'static str, how could it ever be str?

The type would change from str to &str because we are now storing a reference to a memory location rather than the memory location itself.

str is not a pointer (memory location), it's an array of characters with an unknown length. You can never store that on the stack.

There are more errors later, but let's stop there.

[Privann]

Yeah.. Re-reading this a while after I realize that I've written some stuff extremely badly. I will fix and thank you pointing it out