No More Nulls

Subject: Enumerated (enum) types, pattern matching, and meaningful return types.

Notes

Today’s episode discusses, in order:

• Enumerated types, with an eye to the difference between structs and enums, and to the differences between enums in C and in Rust.
• Pattern matching, with a focus on using them with enumerated types and some discussion about how they differ from switch blocks in C-like languages.
• Using the Option and Result enumerated types with pattern matching to provide meaningful returns from functions safely.

Order

There is a specific order to the examples below, and it is not the automatically-alphabetized order rendered by rustdoc. Instead, you should work through in the sequence they appear in the source:

1. RelatedishThings
2. demonstrate_basic_enumeration
3. demonstrate_match
4. get_an_option
5. demonstrate_option
6. get_a_result
7. demonstrate_result

Links

• New Rustacean Pull Request #1
• Work on IDE support!
  • Landing page
  • My chosen tool: JetBrains/IntelliJ
• Rustlings
• Rust FFI Omnibus

Follow/Support

• New Rustacean:
  • Twitter: @newrustacean
  • App.net: @newrustacean
  • Patreon
  • Email: hello at newrustacean dot com
• Chris Krycho
  • Twitter: @chriskrycho
  • App.net: @chriskrycho