Bounds Checks

By default, accesses to container types such as slices and vectors involve bounds checks in Rust. These can affect performance, e.g. within hot loops, though less often than you might expect.

There are several safe ways to change code so that the compiler knows about container lengths and can optimize away bounds checks.

• Replace direct element accesses in a loop by using iteration.
• Instead of indexing into a Vec within a loop, make a slice of the Vec before the loop and then index into the slice within the loop.
• Add assertions on the ranges of index variables. Example 1, Example 2.

Getting these to work can be tricky. The Bounds Check Cookbook goes into more detail on this topic.

As a last resort, there are the unsafe methods get_unchecked and get_unchecked_mut.