part02.rs

#

Rust-101, Part 02: Generic types, Traits

#

Let us for a moment reconsider the type NumberOrNothing. Isn’t it a bit annoying that we had to hard-code the type i32 in there? What if tomorrow, we want a CharOrNothing, and later a FloatOrNothing? Certainly we don’t want to re-write the type and all its inherent methods.

#

Generic datatypes

#

The solution to this is called generics or polymorphism (the latter is Greek, meaning “many shapes”). You may know something similar from C++ (where it’s called templates) or Java, or one of the many functional languages. So here, we define a generic type SomethingOrNothing.

pub enum SomethingOrNothing<T>  {
    Something(T),
    Nothing,
}
#

Instead of writing out all the variants, we can also just import them all at once.

pub use self::SomethingOrNothing::*;
#

What this does is define an entire family of types: We can now write SomethingOrNothing<i32> to get back our NumberOrNothing.

type NumberOrNothing = SomethingOrNothing<i32>;
#

However, we can also write SomethingOrNothing<bool> or even SomethingOrNothing<SomethingOrNothing<i32>>. In fact, a type like SomethingOrNothing is so useful that it is already present in the standard library: It’s called an option type, written Option<T>. Go check out its documentation! (And don’t worry, there’s indeed lots of material mentioned there that we have not covered yet.)

#

Generic impl, Static functions

The types are so similar, that we can provide a generic function to construct a SomethingOrNothing<T> from an Option<T>, and vice versa.

Notice the syntax for giving generic implementations to generic types: Think of the first <T> as declaring a type variable (“I am doing something for all types T”), and the second <T> as using that variable (“The thing I do, is implement SomethingOrNothing<T>”).

Inside an impl, Self refers to the type we are implementing things for. Here, it is an alias for SomethingOrNothing<T>. Remember that self is the this of Rust, and implicitly has type Self.

impl<T> SomethingOrNothing<T> {
    fn new(o: Option<T>) -> Self {
        match o { None => Nothing, Some(t) => Something(t) }
    }

    fn to_option(self) -> Option<T> {
        match self { Nothing => None, Something(t) => Some(t) }
    }
}
#

Observe how new does not have a self parameter. This corresponds to a static method in Java or C++. In fact, new is the Rust convention for defining constructors: They are nothing special, just static functions returning Self.

You can call static functions, and in particular constructors, as demonstrated in call_constructor.

fn call_constructor(x: i32) -> SomethingOrNothing<i32> {
    SomethingOrNothing::new(Some(x))
}
#

Traits

Now that we have a generic SomethingOrNothing, wouldn’t it be nice to also have a generic vec_min? Of course, we can’t take the minimum of a vector of any type. It has to be a type supporting a min operation. Rust calls such properties that we may demand of types traits.

#

So, as a first step towards a generic vec_min, we define a Minimum trait. For now, just ignore the Copy, we will come back to this point later. A trait is a lot like interfaces in Java: You define a bunch of functions you want to have implemented, and their argument and return types.
The function min takes two arguments of the same type, but I made the first argument the special self argument. I could, alternatively, have made min a static function as follows: fn min(a: Self, b: Self) -> Self. However, in Rust one typically prefers methods over static functions wherever possible.

pub trait Minimum : Copy {
    fn min(self, b: Self) -> Self;
}
#

Next, we write vec_min as a generic function over a type T that we demand to satisfy the Minimum trait. This requirement is called a trait bound. The only difference to the version from the previous part is that we call e.min(n) instead of min_i32(n, e). Rust automatically figures out that e is of type T, which implements the Minimum trait, and hence we can call that function.

There is a crucial difference to templates in C++: We actually have to declare which traits we want the type to satisfy. If we left away the Minimum, Rust would have complained that we cannot call min. Just try it!
This is in strong contrast to C++, where the compiler only checks such details when the function is actually used.

pub fn vec_min<T: Minimum>(v: Vec<T>) -> SomethingOrNothing<T> {
    let mut min = Nothing;
    for e in v {
        min = Something(match min {
            Nothing => e,
#

Here, we can now call the min function of the trait.

            Something(n) => {
                e.min(n)
            }
        });
    }
    min
}
#

Before going on, take a moment to ponder the flexibility of Rust’s take on abstraction: We just defined our own, custom trait (interface), and then implemented that trait for an existing type. With the hierarchical approach of, e.g., C++ or Java, that’s not possible: We cannot make an existing type also inherit from our abstract base class after the fact.

In case you are worried about performance, note that Rust performs monomorphisation of generic functions: When you call vec_min with T being i32, Rust essentially goes ahead and creates a copy of the function for this particular type, filling in all the blanks. In this case, the call to T::min will become a call to our implementation statically. There is no dynamic dispatch, like there would be for Java interface methods or C++ virtual methods. This behavior is similar to C++ templates. The optimizer (Rust is using LLVM) then has all the information it could want to, e.g., inline function calls.

#

Trait implementations

To make vec_min usable with a Vec<i32>, we implement the Minimum trait for i32.

impl Minimum for i32 {
    fn min(self, b: Self) -> Self {
        if self < b { self } else { b }
    }
}
#

We again provide a print function. This also shows that we can have multiple impl blocks for the same type (remember that NumberOrNothing is just a type alias for SomethingOrNothing<i32>), and we can provide some methods only for certain instances of a generic type.

impl NumberOrNothing {
    pub fn print(self) {
        match self {
            Nothing => println!("The number is: <nothing>"),
            Something(n) => println!("The number is: {}", n),
        };
    }
}
#

Now we are ready to run our new code. Remember to change main.rs appropriately. Rust figures out automatically that we want the T of vec_min to be i32, and that i32 implements Minimum and hence all is good.

fn read_vec() -> Vec<i32> {
    vec![18,5,7,3,9,27]
}
pub fn main() {
    let vec = read_vec();
    let min = vec_min(vec);
    min.print();
}
#

If this printed 3, then your generic vec_min is working! So get ready for the next part.

#

Exercise 02.1: Change your program such that it computes the minimum of a Vec<f32> (where f32 is the type of 32-bit floating-point numbers). You should not change vec_min in any way, obviously!