Ownership

This is a novel feature of Rust, I haven't seen this in any other language so far. It's how Rust achieves memory safety without requiring either garbage collection or manual memory management. It achieves this by extensive compile time analysis of references, as well as implementing the general ownership concept.

But why would you actually want that? Well, because you get the advantages of both worlds. Manual memory management is cumbersome and error-prone. The biggest selling point of Rust for projects using lower level languages is memory safety, eliminating a whole class of errors, especially in terms of security. In addition to that, you retain the speed and real time properties of manual memory managed languages, features that garbage collected languages either can't provide or are severely lacking in.

Now that you know why this is such a big deal, let's see how it is achieved!