Ownership with smart pointers in Rust - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Ownership with smart pointers

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple program to manage a book's title using Rust's smart pointers. This will help you understand how ownership works with smart pointers in Rust.

🎯 Goal: Create a Rust program that uses a Box smart pointer to own a book title string, then change the title using ownership rules, and finally print the updated title.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Box smart pointer to hold a book title string

Create a mutable variable to hold the boxed title

Change the title by assigning a new boxed string

Print the updated book title

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Smart pointers like <code>Box</code> help manage memory safely in Rust programs, especially when working with data on the heap.

💼 Career

Understanding ownership and smart pointers is essential for Rust developers to write safe and efficient code.

1

Create a boxed book title

Create a variable called book_title that uses Box::new to hold the string "Rust Programming".

Rust

# Your code here

Hint

Use Box::new to create a smart pointer that owns the string.

2

Make the boxed title mutable

Change the variable book_title to be mutable by adding mut so you can change its value later.

Rust

let mut book_title = Box::new("Rust Programming");
# Your code here

Hint

Add mut before the variable name to make it mutable.

3

Change the boxed book title

Assign a new boxed string "Advanced Rust" to the mutable variable book_title.

Rust

let mut book_title = Box::new("Rust Programming");
book_title = Box::new("Advanced Rust");  # Your code here

Hint

Assign a new Box::new string to book_title.

4

Print the updated book title

Use println! to print the value inside the book_title smart pointer. Use *book_title to dereference it.

Rust

let mut book_title = Box::new("Rust Programming");
book_title = Box::new("Advanced Rust");
println!("{}", *book_title);  # Your code here

Hint

Use println!("{}", *book_title); to print the string inside the box.