Lifetimes

• Lifetimes are a way to manage and ensure memory safety by defining the scope for which a reference is valid.

• Prevent dangling references and ensure that references don't outlive the data they point to.

• Lifetime are denoted using (') followed by a name, like 'a.

• Most of the time, we don't need to explicitly annotate lifetimes because Rust has lifetime elision rules to infer lifetimes in simple cases.

• References:

  • Lifetimes - Rust By Example

  • Validating References with Lifetimes

  • Lifetime Elision

lifetimes1.rs

// The Rust compiler needs to know how to check whether supplied references are
// valid, so that it can let the programmer know if a reference is at risk of
// going out of scope before it is used. Remember, references are borrows and do
// not own their own data. What if their owner goes out of scope?

// Fix the compiler error by updating the function signature.
fn longest<'a>(x: &'a str, y: &'a str) -> &'a str {
    if x.len() > y.len() {
        x
    } else {
        y
    }
}

fn main() {
    // You can optionally experiment here.
}

#[cfg(test)]
mod tests {
    use super::*;

    #[test]
    fn test_longest() {
        assert_eq!(longest("abcd", "123"), "abcd");
        assert_eq!(longest("abc", "1234"), "1234");
    }
}

• This exercise is a bit easy.

• Rust cannot infer the lifetime of input reference in function longest.

• So we need to define lifetime explicitly by adding 'a (you can change the lifetime name with anything you want).

• This is to bind the lifetime of input x and y into the output of longest function.

lifetimes2.rs

// Don't change this function.
fn longest<'a>(x: &'a str, y: &'a str) -> &'a str {
    if x.len() > y.len() {
        x
    } else {
        y
    }
}

fn main() {
    // Fix the compiler error by moving one line.

    let string1 = String::from("long string is long");
    let result;
    {
        let string2 = String::from("xyz");
        result = longest(&string1, &string2);
        println!("The longest string is '{result}'");
    }
}

• This exercise is easy.

• The println macro is using result variables which already out of scope (rust already drop it) so we cannot access it anymore.

• We just need to move the line to inside the bracket.

lifetimes3.rs

// Lifetimes are also needed when structs hold references.

// Fix the compiler errors about the struct.
struct Book<'a> {
    author: &'a str,
    title: &'a str,
}

fn main() {
    let book = Book {
        author: "George Orwell",
        title: "1984",
    };

    println!("{} by {}", book.title, book.author);
}

• In this exercise we have struct Book that hold a reference.

• So we ned to explicitly define lifetime of each reference in the struct so the struct doesn't outlive the reference.

• We can do it like this:

  struct Book<'a> {
      author: &'a str,
      title: &'a str,
  }