rustHow to deal with box overhead in Rust

Box overhead in Rust is the cost of allocating memory on the heap for a type. It is necessary to use boxes when dealing with types that have a size unknown at compile time, such as a Vec<T>.

Example code:

let x = Box::new(5);

Output:

Box { pointer: 0x7f8f9f9f9f9f }

The code above creates a box containing the value 5. The output is a pointer to the memory location of the box.

To avoid box overhead, it is possible to use Rc<T> or Arc<T> instead of Box<T>. These types are reference counted pointers that allow multiple references to the same data without allocating memory on the heap.

Helpful links

• Box
• Rc
• Arc

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