[DougBTX]

> I could be wrong or could just have not seen the right code bases, but there is very little C style byte level ‘data structure’ layout design and then the allocation of those sorts of data using multiple allocation strategies.

My experience is mostly in very high level languages, C#, TypeScript, SQL, so that's probably reflected in the style of Rust code that I've been writing, but at least as one data point, yes, it is very possible to write day-to-day Rust code without getting into byte level data layout.

It does feel a lot like writing C code without using a heap. In fact the only case I've dealt with allocating uninitialised heap memory so far has been when interacting with a C API. Creating a new Vec does allocate memory on the heap (once values are pushed into it), but as a user it feels like passing around any other stack allocated struct. I think this is mostly due to the RIIA-style Drop and ownership system, as there is no extra code to free a value that owns a heap allocation vs a stack-only value.

The implementation of std::mem::drop is a fun example of this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/fn.drop.html