Understanding Rust struct field drop order
This is an easy Rust question that tests your grasp of a subtle but important language guarantee: the order in which struct fields are destroyed when a value goes out of scope. It's the kind of thing that rarely matters in practice, but understanding it deeply separates candidates who truly know the language from those who've only skimmed the docs.
The question forces you to reason about Rust's ownership model and the deterministic cleanup semantics that make the language safe and predictable. When a struct is dropped, fields are destroyed in a specific, well-defined order—and knowing this order matters when fields have interdependencies or custom Drop implementations.
- Field declaration order and drop semantics
- The
Drop trait and manual cleanup
- Scope and lifetime interactions