Generics

Generic functions

Throughout this tutorial, I've been defining functions like map and for_rev to take vectors of integers. It is 2011, and we no longer expect to be defining such functions again and again for every type they apply to. Thus, Rust allows functions and datatypes to have type parameters.

fn for_rev<T>(v: [T], act: block(T)) {
    let i = std::vec::len(v);
    while i > 0u {
        i -= 1u;
        act(v[i]);
    }
}

fn map<T, U>(f: block(T) -> U, v: [T]) -> [U] {
    let acc = [];
    for elt in v { acc += [f(elt)]; }
    ret acc;
}

When defined in this way, these functions can be applied to any type of vector, as long as the type of the block's argument and the type of the vector's content agree with each other.

Inside a parameterized (generic) function, the names of the type parameters (capitalized by convention) stand for opaque types. You can't look inside them, but you can pass them around.

Generic datatypes

Generic type and tag declarations follow the same pattern:

type circular_buf<T> = {start: uint,
                        end: uint,
                        buf: [mutable T]};

tag option<T> { some(T); none; }

You can then declare a function to take a circular_buf<u8> or return an option<str>, or even an option<T> if the function itself is generic.

The option type given above exists in the standard library as std::option::t, and is the way Rust programs express the thing that in C would be a nullable pointer. The nice part is that you have to explicitly unpack an option type, so accidental null pointer dereferences become impossible.

Type-inference and generics

Rust's type inferrer works very well with generics, but there are programs that just can't be typed.

let n = none;

If you never do anything else with none, the compiler will not be able to assign a type to it. (The same goes for [], in fact.) If you really want to have such a statement, you'll have to write it like this:

let n = none::<int>;

Note that, in a value expression, < already has a meaning as a comparison operator, so you'll have to write ::<T> to explicitly give a type to a name that denotes a generic value. Fortunately, this is rarely necessary.

Polymorphic built-ins

There are two built-in operations that, perhaps surprisingly, act on values of any type. It was already mentioned earlier that log can take any type of value and output it as a string.

More interesting is that Rust also defines an ordering for all datatypes, and allows you to meaningfully apply comparison operators (<, >, <=, >=, ==, !=) to them. For structural types, the comparison happens left to right, so "abc" < "bac" (but note that "bac" < "ác", because the ordering acts on UTF-8 sequences without any sophistication).

Generic functions and argument-passing

If you try this program:

fn plus1(x: int) -> int { x + 1 }
map(plus1, [1, 2, 3]);

You will get an error message about argument passing styles disagreeing. The reason is that generic types are always passed by pointer, so map expects a function that takes its argument by pointer. The plus1 you defined, however, uses the default, efficient way to pass integers, which is by value. To get around this issue, you have to explicitly mark the arguments to a function that you want to pass to a generic higher-order function as being passed by pointer:

fn plus1(&&x: int) -> int { x + 1 }
map(plus1, [1, 2, 3]);

NOTE: This is inconvenient, and we are hoping to get rid of this restriction in the future.

FIXME discuss kinds, when they have settled

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