Rust Drop Trait - rFronteddu/general_wiki GitHub Wiki

The second trait important to the smart pointer pattern is Drop, which lets you customize what happens when a value is about to go out of scope. You can provide an implementation for the Drop trait on any type, and that code can be used to release resources like files or network connections.

We’re introducing Drop in the context of smart pointers because the functionality of the Drop trait is almost always used when implementing a smart pointer. For example, when a Box is dropped it will deallocate the space on the heap that the box points to.

In some languages, for some types, the programmer must call code to free memory or resources every time they finish using an instance of those types. Examples include file handles, sockets, or locks. If they forget, the system might become overloaded and crash. In Rust, you can specify that a particular bit of code be run whenever a value goes out of scope, and the compiler will insert this code automatically. As a result, you don’t need to be careful about placing cleanup code everywhere in a program that an instance of a particular type is finished with—you still won’t leak resources!

You specify the code to run when a value goes out of scope by implementing the Drop trait. The Drop trait requires you to implement one method named drop that takes a mutable reference to self.

For example:

struct CustomSmartPointer {
    data: String,
}

impl Drop for CustomSmartPointer {
    fn drop(&mut self) {
        println!("Dropping CustomSmartPointer with data `{}`!", self.data);
    }
}

fn main() {
    let c = CustomSmartPointer {
        data: String::from("my stuff"),
    };
    let d = CustomSmartPointer {
        data: String::from("other stuff"),
    };
    println!("CustomSmartPointers created.");
}

The Drop trait is included in the prelude, so we don’t need to bring it into scope. We implement the Drop trait on CustomSmartPointer and provide an implementation for the drop method that calls println!. The body of the drop function is where you would place any logic that you wanted to run when an instance of your type goes out of scope. We’re printing some text here to demonstrate visually when Rust will call drop.

In main, we create two instances of CustomSmartPointer and then print CustomSmartPointers created. At the end of main, our instances of CustomSmartPointer will go out of scope, and Rust will call the code we put in the drop method, printing our final message. Note that we didn’t need to call the drop method explicitly.

Dropping a value early with std::mem::drop

Unfortunately, it’s not straightforward to disable the automatic drop functionality. Disabling drop isn’t usually necessary; the whole point of the Drop trait is that it’s taken care of automatically. Occasionally, however, you might want to clean up a value early. One example is when using smart pointers that manage locks: you might want to force the drop method that releases the lock so that other code in the same scope can acquire the lock. Rust doesn’t let you call the Drop trait’s drop method manually; instead you have to call the std::mem::drop function provided by the standard library if you want to force a value to be dropped before the end of its scope.

Rust doesn’t let us call drop explicitly because Rust would still automatically call drop on the value at the end of main. This would cause a double free error because Rust would be trying to clean up the same value twice.

We can’t disable the automatic insertion of drop when a value goes out of scope, and we can’t call the drop method explicitly. So, if we need to force a value to be cleaned up early, we use the std::mem::drop function.

The std::mem::drop function is different from the drop method in the Drop trait. We call it by passing as an argument the value we want to force drop.

You can use code specified in a Drop trait implementation in many ways to make cleanup convenient and safe: for instance, you could use it to create your own memory allocator! With the Drop trait and Rust’s ownership system, you don’t have to remember to clean up because Rust does it automatically.

You also don’t have to worry about problems resulting from accidentally cleaning up values still in use: the ownership system that makes sure references are always valid also ensures that drop gets called only once when the value is no longer being used.