A Visual Map Of Rust Types
I made a visual map of commonly used Rust data types.
While the Rust documentation is quite alright, it helps to have a
visual overview of how these types are laid out in memory.
Knowing the layout is important for getting a deep understanding of
what exactly happens when you move, copy, or clone an instance.
This data layout applies to many programming languages, but I feel it’s particularly interesting for Rust because the language relies heavily on move semantics and references.
Visualizing it helps a lot, for example in reasoning about what a
reference to an Rc is, or in realizing that passing a large Vec
to a function is a cheap operation, or in explaining that the backend
storage of a Vec not only may grow, but also may be completely reallocated
(and thus be relocated in memory) without you needing to explicitly be aware
of that.
