My First Steps In Rust

This is a highly subjective post about my first experiences in Rust. I have been reading tutorials, posts and docs for two months before I dared to write my first lines in Rust. The learning curve is very steep especially after experimenting with Elixir.

With Elixir I felt home from the very first moment and I could write programs instantly. With Rust I am constantly re-reading the manuals and still my first few lines took a day to write.

Still, I have good reasons for suspending my Elixir experiments for a while and focus on Rust. With Elixir I found myself missing the type enforcements and started implementing run-time type checks with misusing function guards and writing tons of unit tests just to make sure I don’t pass invalid objects around.

In Rust I have to write type-safe code from square one which made me afraid to jump in. Finally I bumped into kernel bypass networking concepts that made me curious for my scalesmall experiments. The libraries like netmap and DPDK are better be used in C/C++ and thus Rust.

My first incorrect code

The code below aims for experimenting with traits and generics. The goal was to create two buffers holding different types and then put the two buffers into a vector and print them. This covers concepts that I know I will need later.

This took me a while to polish to this level but than I was stuck with en error that I couldn’t understand and neither found a good explanation what it is about in my case:

pub fn testme () { trait Info { fn sz ( & self ) -> usize ; fn print ( & self ); } struct Buffer < T > { buf : Vec < T > , } impl < T > Info for Buffer < T > { fn sz ( & self ) -> usize { self .buf .len () } fn print ( & self ) { for i in & self .buf { println! ( "trait: {:?}" , i ); } } } let int_buf = Buffer { buf : vec! [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] }; let float_buf = Buffer { buf : vec! [ 1.1 , 2.1 , 3.1 ] }; let buffers = vec! [ & int_buf as & Info , & float_buf as & Info ]; for i in & buffers { println! ( "sz: {}" , i .sz ()); i .print (); } }

The error was:

dbeck$ cargo run Compiling actor v0.1.0 (file:///Users/dbeck/work/actor_rs) src/x/mod.rs:22:33: 22:34 error: the trait `core::fmt::Debug` is not implemented for the type `T` [E0277] src/x/mod.rs:22 println!("trait: {:?}", i); ^ <std macros>:2:25: 2:56 note: in this expansion of format_args! <std macros>:3:1: 3:54 note: in this expansion of print! (defined in <std macros>) src/x/mod.rs:22:9: 22:36 note: in this expansion of println! (defined in <std macros>) src/x/mod.rs:22:33: 22:34 help: run `rustc --explain E0277` to see a detailed explanation src/x/mod.rs:22:33: 22:34 note: `T` cannot be formatted using `:?`; if it is defined in your crate, add `#[derive(Debug)]` or manually implement it src/x/mod.rs:22:33: 22:34 note: required by `core::fmt::Debug::fmt` error: aborting due to previous error Could not compile `actor`. To learn more, run the command again with --verbose.

This was exactly the thing why I was afraid to jump in. The error tells me that my T type doesn’t implement the Debug trait. It was clear that the error message is bogus and misleading since type T is either i32 or f32 which does implement the Debug trait otherwise I wouldn’t be able to print those in a non-generic code.

It looks like the generic code’s type T doesn’t get resolved when the compiler arrives to the println! macro.

I went great lengths to try instantiating type T until I realized that it works very differently compared to C++.

The correct code

Notice the two changes below:

pub fn testme () { // Change #1 use std :: fmt ; trait Info { fn sz ( & self ) -> usize ; fn print ( & self ); } struct Buffer < T > { buf : Vec < T > , } // Change #2 impl < T : fmt :: Debug > Info for Buffer < T > { fn sz ( & self ) -> usize { self .buf .len () } fn print ( & self ) { for i in & self .buf { println! ( "trait: {:?}" , i ); } } } let int_buf = Buffer { buf : vec! [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] }; let float_buf = Buffer { buf : vec! [ 1.1 , 2.1 , 3.1 ] }; let buffers = vec! [ & int_buf as & Info , & float_buf as & Info ]; for i in & buffers { println! ( "sz: {}" , i .sz ()); i .print (); } }

I can’t remember how I arrived to this solution since I made so many desperate attempts to fix it. When it worked, it clicked in perfectly. I don’t need to instantiate the type, what I need is to give information to the compiler about the type. So I need to restrict type T , so the trait implementation only accepts types that actually implement the Debug trait. So the compiler was unhappy because of the possibility to pass types that doesn’t implement the Debug trait and not what it was telling me: that I did pass a type that doesn’t.

This makes sense and I like the way it is. Actually, I even prefer the Rust’s way of generics compared to C++ templates. I am very positive about my next steps in Rust despite the unhelpful and misleading error messages, because I think once I understand how it works, I can reason about the code no matter what the compiler is complaining about.

Rust version

$ rustc --version rustc 1.7.0 (a5d1e7a59 2016-02-29)

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