Basics of Ownership - Rust Crash Course lesson 2

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Below are the solutions to the exercises from the last Rust Crash Course lesson, "Basics of Ownership."

This post is part of a series based on teaching Rust at FP Complete. If you're reading this post outside of the blog, you can find links to all posts in the series at the top of the introduction post. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed.

Exercise 1

Implementing drop is fairly simple. We need a function that allows a value to be moved into it, and then does nothing with that value.

fn drop<T>(_: T) {
}

And surprise: check out the actual drop function.

Exercise 2

The important trick to implement this method syntax is that the first parameter must be some form of self. We want to keep this as an immutable reference, so we use &self.

#[derive(Debug)]
struct Foobar(i32);

impl Drop for Foobar {
    fn drop(&mut self) {
        println!("Dropping a Foobar: {:?}", self);
    }
}

impl Foobar {
    fn use_it(&self) {
        println!("I consumed a Foobar: {:?}", self);
    }
}

fn main() {
    let x = Foobar(1);
    println!("Before uses_foobar");
    x.use_it();
    x.use_it();
    println!("After uses_foobar");
}

You may be wondering: why does the code use x.use_it()? use_it requires a reference to a Foobar, but x is a Foobar! In fact, you may have ended up writing something like this:

fn main() {
    let x = Foobar(1);
    println!("Before uses_foobar");
    (&x).use_it();
    (&x).use_it();
    println!("After uses_foobar");
}

While that's perfectly valid code, it's also unnecessary: Rust will automatically take a reference to a value in the case of a method call.

Exercise 3

The original code doesn't compile, since our x value was moved. However, if we have a Copy implementation, Rust will automatically create a copy of the value for us. As I hinted, you can do this easily by using automatic deriving:

#[derive(Debug, Clone, Copy)]
struct Foobar(i32);

fn uses_foobar(foobar: Foobar) {
    println!("I consumed a Foobar: {:?}", foobar);
}

fn main() {
    let x = Foobar(1);
    uses_foobar(x);
    uses_foobar(x);
}

If you want to be more explicit, you can write the implementations directly. Note that, to the best of my knowledge, there's no advantage to doing so, at least in this case:

impl Clone for Foobar {
    fn clone(&self) -> Self {
        Foobar(self.0)
    }
}
impl Copy for Foobar {
}

There's no need for a body for the Copy trait. Its only purpose is as a signal to the compiler that it's acceptable to copy when needed.

Exercise 4

We're not taking a reference to x when calling double, so our double function needs to take an actual Foobar, not a reference to one. It must also return a Foobar. One implementation we could come up with is:

fn double(foobar: Foobar) -> Foobar {
    Foobar(foobar.0 * 2)
}

This takes in an immutable Foobar, and then constructs a new Foobar from the value inside of it. Another option, however, would be to mutate the original Foobar and then return it:

fn double(mut foobar: Foobar) -> Foobar {
    foobar.0 *= 2;
    foobar
}

The Haskeller in me prefers the first implementation, since it has less mutation. The troll in me loves the second one, since it lets me taunt the Haskeller in me.

Rust at FP Complete | Introduction