Why Rust? - The Type System

Need a reason or look for arguments to use Rust for your next project? I collect reasons in the "Why Rust" series. This time, we look a bit at the type system.

Rich type system

Rust is a strictly typed language, with a flexible way of expressing yourself. You can define your own objects (struct):

struct User {
    name: String,
    first_name: String,
    age: u64,
    address: String,
}

We already see here that we can improve this piece of code by giving it more meaning. We can add additional structures around information like address and name:

struct Name {
    first: String,
    last: String,
}

struct Address: {
    street_name: String,
    house_number: u64,
    city: String,
    country: String,
    postal_code: u64,
}

struct User {
    name: Name,
    age: u64,
    address: Address,
}

But what if we don't have the age or address of a user? Rust has Enums as well. One popular one is the Option enum, which gives you the ability to express if something has a value or not. So no null pointers or undefined in Rust:

enum Option<T> {
    None,
    Some(T),
}

We can see it in action in our user struct:

struct User {
    name: Name,
    age: Option<u64>,
    address: Option<Address>,
}

We later on can check in our code if an object has a variable set or not, and the compiler errors if we try to access a variable which might not be set:

fn check_age(user: User) {
    match user.age {
        Some(age) => println!("The age is {}", age),
        None => println!("We don't know the age of the user!"),
    }
}

Implementing behavior on these types is done via so-called impl block:

impl User {
    fn new(name: Name) -> User {
        name,
        age: None,
        addresS: None,
    }

    fn assign_age(&self, age: u64) -> User {
        self.age = age;
        self
    }

    is_old_enough(&self, required_age: u64) -> bool {
        self.age >= required_age
    }
}

fn main() {
    let n = Name { first_name: "FirstName".to_string(), name: "LastName".to_string() };
    let u = User::new(n);
    n.assign_age(30);

    println!("{}" n.is_old_enough(18));
}