Memory is a resource just like any other, but in all programming languages that I know, it is handled differently.

One, quite obvious, difference in many programming languages is that memory does not have to be released explicitly because a garbage collector takes care of that. Although Rust does not rely heavily on garbage collectors, I will spend some time explaining garbage collectors.

A second difference is more subtle and we will discuss it later on (see section 'Not all memory needs to be acquired').

But first, let us start with some examples of how memory is used in some of today's most common programming languages.