Visualizing Rust's Vtables: How dyn Trait Works In Memory

In one line

A follow-along series of coding experiments as I explore Rust’s peculiarities, from a C++ developer’s perspective.

Opening excerpt

I’m venturing into Rust and it’s both satisfying and mind-boggling at the same time. So far I’ve been learning from the book and Mara Bos’ book , but I got the itch to do some dissecting myself. My initial goal of these experiments was to compare Rust’s approach to polymorphism with C++’s. Ultimately, however, as I’ve come to realize, it’s a bit of a trap when trying to understand a new language through another one to try to draw 1:1 parallels. It might seem like it helps, but at the end of the day, we can’t treat Rust as C++ with different syntax. If that were the case, there’d be nothing revolutionary about it.

That said, I believe there is merit in poking around and coming to understand the why . So, if you’re like me and need to know what exactly is happening in memory, in order to feel like you truly understand the concepts, hopefully you’ll find this post useful :)

By the way, the thumbnail image is a photo of the rust fungus, to which we owe Rust’s name. Credit: gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K , CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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