Why Generic Types?

  • Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY): Don't write the same code twice with slight changes; don't copy-paste

  • Let's make a stack.

    playground

  • This is terrible. I spent a ton of time editing this example:

    • Any mistake I made had to be fixed three times

    • It was easy to forget to fix up everything when copy-pasting

Going Generic

  • A "generic type" is a type symbol used as a placeholder for an empty type. Of course, the type must eventually be filled in

  • By (ugly) convention, Rust generic types are usually single capital letters

  • Angle brackets are used to fill in a generic with a particular type, as with Vec in the playground

  • Let's make a generic stack

    playground

Generic Consequences

  • Compiler generates three copies of the code for our example: one for each type at which it is instantiated

  • Compiler can inline the code effectively, since it all has concrete types at compile time

  • Generic types are still monomorphic: we can't mix types on our stack (but could use an enum type)

Turbofish

  • Note that we changed the calling syntax in a funny way to fill in the types in our example

  • An alternative is to fill in at the call site, but this requires special syntax

    playground

Type Constraints

  • There isn't much we can do with values of a generic type, since it's completely generic — any type could appear

  • Can constrain generic types to obey particular "traits" (next lecture)

  • This trades flexibility for usability; try to find the least constrained thing that will work

    playground

  • Where clauses are a thing

Last modified: Monday, 15 July 2019, 12:17 PM