How to write a Rust program's heap memory contents into a file?

I'm looking for something similar to the runtime/debug/WriteHeapDump in Go.

Is there any method to do such a thing without using external debug tools?

Nothing platform-independent, at least. Rust doesn't even guarantee that there is a heap - it delegates that to an allocator, whose default implementation varies by platform and which may not be present at all (eg. in a no_std program designed for an embedded device).

You can trigger a core dump using platform-dependent features, which will usually get you a complete image of your program's memory at that point in time, although in practice the details vary a lot and are often heavily configurable. On Unix-like OSes, that's usually done by sending any of a few signals to your own process, which can be done through the nix crate pretty easily. Note that most signals that can cause a core dump also terminate the process, however.

Some debuggers can also force a core dump from the process they're attached to, usually without forcing it to exit. There are also crates for causing a core dump on panic, if you'd prefer to capture one automatically if and when your program encounters a problem outside of your normal error handling.

Depending on what you want a heap dump for, you could also write your own allocator as a wrapper around the default allocator, to log allocations and deallocations, or even use a slab allocator or a full-blown garbage collector for the relevant allocations and use its debugging features to track down whatever it is you need.

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