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Use-after-free error

As explained in Refactoring to Rust

Use after free is an error in which a program accesses memory after that memory has been deallocated.

A use-after-free error occurs when a program accesses memory after it has been deallocated. The memory may have been reused, cleared, or still contain old data, so the result is unpredictable. section 2.2

Manual memory management makes this mistake easy to create: every allocated value must be freed exactly once, yet later code may still try to use it. section 2.2

How Refactoring to Rust covers it

How deep it goes
Defines the failure and illustrates deallocation choices, but stops short of detailed compiler or runtime internals.
Examples
Uses K welcome programs that explicitly free a user's name outside or inside the welcome function.
What you can do after
Evaluate how explicit deallocation can leave later memory access unsafe.
How it connects
Connects memory allocation, manual memory management, deallocation, and compiler behavior.

Related concepts

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Refactoring to Rust. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.