Rust offers programmers a way to write memory-safe software without garbage collection, running at machine-native speed. It’s also a complex language to master, with a fairly steep initial learning curve. Here are five gotchas, snags, and traps to watch for when you’re getting your footing with Rust—and for more seasoned Rust developers, too.
You can’t ‘toggle off’ the borrow checker
Don’t use ‘_’ for variables you want to bind
Closures don’t have the same lifetime rules as functions
Destructors don’t always run when a borrow expires
Beware of unsafe things and unbounded lifetimes
.unwrap() surrenders error-handling control
Ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes are baked into Rust. They’re an integral part of how the language maintains memory safety without garbage collection.
