For this post I'm looking at Chapter 13. Utility Traits in the Programming Rust book.
I don't expect radically new stuff here – but, given the importance of traits, rather some practical things into how idiomatic Rust should look like.
The book defines three broad categories of utility traits:
This installement of my Rust learning series deals with Chapter 12. Operator Overloading
I'm actually a bit wary of operator overloading, as it's easily ab/overused, and objects then behaving in a opaque "magical" way. Sometimes it's just clearer to spell a method out instead of binding it to …
This post corresponds to Chapter 11. Traits and Generics.
Traits are like interfaces or abstract base classes – contracts that describe what a type can do by describing it's methods. Optionally, they can also define default implementations of the methods they prescribe.
An example trait:
trait Write {
fn write(&mut …This post corresponds to Chapter 10. Enums and Patterns.
Rusts enums are like C unions: they can be one of several kinds of data.
Patterns in Rust resemble the ones in Erlang; they allow to match on parts of a data structure and bind parts of it to variables …
This post corresponds to Chapter 9. Structs in the "Programming Rust" book.
Rust structs are data collection; fields can be named or tuple (or there can be no fields at all). Like in Go, you can have methods bound to structs (there is no separate "class" concept).
This post corresponds to "Chapter 8. Crates and Modules" in the book.
Crates are the package format for Rust; they're made up of source code plus tests, data, etc. Managing those packages is the job of cargo, came across this previously. Building crates is triggered by running cargo …
This post corresponds to "Chapter 7. Error Handling" in the book. It's a short chapter on Rusts panic and Result types.
Unlike Python, and similar to Go, Rust doesn't use Exceptions to handle errors. Instead, "expected" errors (things like EPERM or ENOENT, i.e. stuff that just can happen …
This part summarizes the sixth chapter of "Programming Rust, 2nd Edition", "Expressions".
All control structures are expressions – they can produce a value. For example:
let status =
if cpu.temperature <= MAX_TEMP {
HttpStatus::Ok
} else {
HttpStatus::ServerError // server melted
};A block can produce a …
This part summarizes the fifth chapter of "Programming Rust, 2nd Edition", "References". There was talk of references before, this chapter provides some additional detail around shared and mutable references and lifetimes.
We have encountered references previously. There are two types
r/o references, can be …
This part summarizes the fourth chapter of "Programming Rust, 2nd Edition" and deals with data ownership.
This to me is one of the most fascinating things in Rust: how it strictly tracks which part of the code holds a piece of data, and how that ownership is passed around …