Zero-Copy

A memory access pattern where data is read or manipulated directly from its original buffer location without allocating new memory or copying bytes. In Solana program development, zero-copy is used to access account data in-place from the runtime's memory-mapped byte slice, avoiding expensive heap allocations and Borsh deserialization overhead. Frameworks like Anchor (#[account(zero_copy)]) and Pinocchio use this pattern extensively to minimize compute unit consumption for large accounts.