Crates and more iterators - Rust Crash Course lesson 4

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I'm getting bored with bouncy, this is our third week talking about this program. It's time to finish this off! How do we do double buffering? It's time to learn about external libraries in Rust, or crates.

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.

We still haven't fixed our double buffering problem, let's finally do that. We're also going to introduce some more error handling from the standard library. And then we'll get to play a bit more with iterators as well.

Finding a crate

To do double buffering in the terminal, we're going to want some kind of a curses library. We're going to look for a crate on crates.io. On that page, search for "curses". Looking through the download counts and the descriptions, pancurses looks nice, especially since it supports Unix and Windows. Let's use it!

Side note If you're wondering, this is exactly the process I went through when writing up bouncy. I had no prior knowledge to tell me pancurses was going to be the right choice. Also, this program happens to be the first time I've ever used a curses library.

Starting a project

We're going to create a new project for this using cargo new. We're going to pull in the bouncy code from the end of week 2 (before the introduction of command line parsing), since as we'll see later, we won't need that parsing anymore.

$ cargo new bouncy4
$ cd bouncy4
$ curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/snoyberg/5307d493750d7b48c1c5281961bc31d0/raw/8f467e87f69a197095bda096cbbb71d8d813b1d7/main.rs > src/main.rs
$ cargo run

The ball should be bouncing around your terminal, right? Great!

Adding the crate

The configuration for your project lives in the file Cargo.toml, known as the manifest. On my system, it looks like this:

[package]
name = "bouncy4"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["Michael Snoyman <michael@snoyman.com>"]

[dependencies]

It will look a bit different on your machine (unless your name is also Michael Snoyman). Notice that [dependencies] section at the end? That's where we add information on external crates. If you go back to the pancurses page on crates.io, you'll see:

Cargo.toml  pancurses = "0.16.0"

It may be different when you're reading this. That's telling us what we can add to the dependencies section to depend on the library. There are lots of details about how to specify dependencies, which we won't get into here (and probably never will in the crash course, I've spent enough of my life discussing dependency management already :) ). You can read more in the Cargo book reference.

Anyway, go ahead and add pancurses = "0.16.0" to the end of your Cargo.toml and run cargo build. cargo should run off and do some updating, downloading, compiling, and end up with an executable that does exactly the same thing as it did before. Perfect, time to use it!

NOTE It seems like, at the time of writing, pancurses does not build against the latest version of the ncurses package. If you get a build failure, you may need to also add ncurses = "= 5.94.0" to your dependencies to force Cargo to use an older, compatible version.

With the current version of the Rust, you'll also need to add the following to the top of src/main.rs:

extern crate pancurses;

This requirement is disappearing with Rust 2018. If you'd like play around with that, you'll need to switch to a nightly compiler and add edition = "2018" to your Cargo.toml. But we're going to stick to the stable compiler and Rust 2015.

Library docs

On the crates.io page, there's a link to the documentation for pancurses. Open that in a new tab. Also, reading down the crates page, we get a nice usage example. In main(), the first call is to initscr. Jump over to the API documentation and search for initscr, and you'll end up at the initscr function.

Let's try this out. Add the following line to the top of your main function and compile:

let window = pancurses::initscr();

Great! We're going to use that returned Window struct to interact with pancurses. Go ahead and open its documentation and start browsing through.

Getting the frame size

We're currently just assigning an arbitrary frame size. Ideally, we'd like to base it off of the actual terminal size. Window provides a method for this, get_max_yx.

First, a step for you dear reader: modify the new method of Game to take a Frame as input. Then, let's jump back to our main. We can capture the maximum y and x values with:

let (max_y, max_x) = window.get_max_yx();

And now let's create a Frame value out of those.

let frame = Frame {
    width: max_x,
    height: max_y,
};

Then pass that value into Game::new(). This will only work if you already modified new to take an extra Frame argument, go back a few paragraphs if you missed that.

Challenge Before you hit compile, can you figure out what error message we're about to encounter?

When I run cargo build, I get the following error:

error[E0308]: mismatched types
   --> src/main.rs:109:16
    |
109 |         width: max_x,
    |                ^^^^^ expected u32, found i32

error[E0308]: mismatched types
   --> src/main.rs:110:17
    |
110 |         height: max_y,
    |                 ^^^^^ expected u32, found i32

If you remember, width and height are u32s, but pancurses gives us i32s for the maximum x and y values. How do we convert? One easy way to handle this is with as u32:

width: max_x as u32,
height: max_y as u32,

This is a totally unchecked cast. To demonstrate, try running this program:

fn main() {
    for i in -5i32..6i32 {
        println!("{} -> {}", i, i as u32)
    }
}

(Yes, there's syntax in Rust for following a number with its type like that, it's really nice.)

Which results in:

-5 -> 4294967291
-4 -> 4294967292
-3 -> 4294967293
-2 -> 4294967294
-1 -> 4294967295
0 -> 0
1 -> 1
2 -> 2
3 -> 3
4 -> 4
5 -> 5

We're going to just accept this bad behavior for now. Don't worry, it'll get worse.

Carriage return and the border

If you run this program, you'll get some really weird looking output. If you don't believe me, go run it yourself now. I'll wait.

The first problem is that our newlines aren't working as expected. We previously used \n to create a newline. However, with curses enabled, this create a line feed, moving the cursor down one row, without a carriage return, moving the cursor to the beginning of the line. Go ahead and replace the \n usages with \r\n.

That's better, but there's still a problem: the grid doesn't fit in the terminal! That's because we didn't take the size of the border into account. Try subtracing 4 from the maximum x and y values and see if that fixes things. (Note: there's a bit of a trick to where you put the - 4. Think about what value you're trying to cast.)

Double buffering

We still haven't done double buffering, but we're in a much better position to do so now! The trick is to replace our println! call in the main function's loop with calls to window methods. If you want the challenge, go read through the docs and try to figure out how to make it work. One hint: you'll need to revert the addition of the \r carriage returns we added above.

loop {
    window.clear(); // get rid of old content
    window.printw(game.to_string()); // write to the buffer
    window.refresh(); // update the screen
    game.step();
    std::thread::sleep(sleep_duration);
}

Hurrah, we have double buffering in place! We can finally be done with these bouncing balls.

Or can we?

Exercise 1

It's time to get more comfortable with exploring API docs, and writing some Rust code with less training wheels. There are a few problems with our implementation:

• We don't need to generate an entire string for the whole grid. Instead, we can use some Window methods for moving the cursor around and adding characters. Use that instead.
• Drawing the border as we have is harder than it should be. There's a method on Window that will help significantly.
• We have a number of assumptions about numbers, in particular that the maximum x and y are positive, and large enough to hold the ball's starting position. Put in some sane limits: both values must be at least 10.
• More advanced, but: pancurses has some built in support for input handling with timeouts. Instead of using std::thread::sleep, we can set a timeout on input handling and add that to our main loop. You can then also respond to two specific kinds of input:
  • Exit the program on a q press
  • Reset the game when the size of the window changes

More iterators!

Alright, I'm sufficiently bored with bouncing balls. Let's talk about something far more interesting: streaming data. Personally I found it easiest to understand iterators by writing a few of them myself, so that's where we're going to start.

Let's do some compiler-guided programming. We discussed previously that there's an Iterator trait. So a fair bet is that we need to create a new data type and provide an implementation of the Iterator trait. Let's start off with something simple: an iterator that produces no values at all.

struct Empty;

fn main() {
    for i in Empty {
        panic!("Wait, this shouldn't happen!");
    }
    println!("All done!");
}

panic!ing is a way to cause the current thread to exit due to an impossible situation. It's kind of like runtime exceptions in other languages, except you can't recover from them. They are only intended to be used for impossible situations.

OK, compile that and you'll get a helpful error message:

error[E0277]: the trait bound `Empty: std::iter::Iterator` is not satisfied

Cool, let's add an empty implementation (no pun intended):

impl Iterator for Empty {
}

More help from the compiler!

error[E0046]: not all trait items implemented, missing: `Item`, `next`
 --> foo.rs:3:1
  |
3 | impl Iterator for Empty {
  | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ missing `Item`, `next` in implementation
  |
  = note: `Item` from trait: `type Item;`
  = note: `next` from trait: `fn(&mut Self) -> std::option::Option<<Self as std::iter::Iterator>::Item>`

So we need to provide two things: Item and next. next is a function, so we'll get to that in a second. What about that type Item;? It's what we call an associated type. It tells us what type of values will be produced by this iterator. Since we're not producing anything, we can use any type here. I'll use a u32:

type Item = u32;

Now we need to add in a next. Above, it gives the type of that function as:

fn(&mut Self) -> std::option::Option<<Self as std::iter::Iterator>::Item>

Let's simplify this bit by bit. The type of the input is &mut Self. However, the correct syntax will be &mut self. Find that confusing? Remember that &mut self is a shortcut for self: &mut Self.

fn(&mut self) -> std::option::Option<<Self as std::iter::Iterator>::Item>

Next, we can remove the module qualifiers for Option and Iterator, since they're already in our namespace:

fn(&mut self) -> Option<<Self as Iterator>::Item>

This Self as Iterator is interesting. It's saying "take the current type, and look at its Iterator implementation. The reason we care about specifying the implementation is because of what comes next: ::Item. What we're really saying is "we want the Item associated type related to the Iterator implementation." It's possible that other traits will also have an associated type with the same name, so this is an unambiguous way to refer to it.

Anyway, let's see if this type signature works. Include the name of the function and give it a dummy function body:

fn next(&mut self) -> Option<<Self as Iterator>::Item> {
    unimplemented!()
}

unimplemented!() is a macro that uses panic! under the surface, and is a convenient way to stub out implementations while under active development. If you compile this, it will succeed. Yay! Then it crashes at runtime due to the unimplemented!. Cool.

We can simplify the signature a bit by removing the as Iterator, which isn't necessary:

fn next(&mut self) -> Option<Self::Item>

You can also replace the Self::Item directly with u32 if you want. The upside is, in this case, it's shorter. The downside is that if you change the Item in the future, you'll have to change it in two places. This is really a subjective point, your call.

Alright, let's provide an implementation. We return an Option, which is an enum with two variants: None or Some. The former means "we don't have anything," the latter means "we have something." Given that we're implementing the empty iterator, returning None seems like the right move:

fn next(&mut self) -> Option<u32> {
    None
}

And just like that, we have our first Iterator implementation!

Exercise 2

Create an iterator that infinitely produces the number 42. Here's a main function to test it out:

fn main() {
    // only take 10 to avoid looping forever
    for i in TheAnswer.take(10) {
        println!("The answer to life, the universe, and everything is {}", i);
    }
    println!("All done!");
}

Mutable state

The signature for next involves taking a mutable reference to self. Let's use it! We're going to create an iterator that counts from 1 to 10. (If you're feeling brave, try to implement it yourself before reading my solution.)

struct OneToTen(u32);

fn one_to_ten() -> OneToTen {
    OneToTen(1)
}

impl Iterator for OneToTen {
    type Item = u32;

    fn next(&mut self) -> Option<u32> {
        if self.0 > 10 {
            None
        } else {
            let res = Some(self.0);
            self.0 += 1;
            res
        }
    }
}

fn main() {
    for i in one_to_ten() {
        println!("{}", i);
    }
}

Exercise 3 Create an iterator that produces the Fibonacci sequence. (Anyone who's heard me bemoaning this exercise in the functional programming world should have a hearty chuckle right now.)

Iterator adapters

We can also write an iterator that will modify an existing iterator. Let's write Doubler, which will double the values produced by a previous iterator. In order to make this work, we're going to capture the underlying iterator inside our new data type, which will also necessitate parameterizing our Doubler data type on the contained iterator:

struct Doubler<I> {
    iter: I,
}

Let's throw in a main function to show how this is used:

fn main() {
    let orig_iter = 1..11; // array indices start at 1
    let doubled_iter = Doubler {
        iter: orig_iter,
    };
    for i in doubled_iter {
        println!("{}", i);
    }
}

Great. If we compile this, we get an error about the missing Iterator implementation. Let's try to write something for this:

impl Iterator for Doubler {
}

When we compile this, we get the error message:

error[E0107]: wrong number of type arguments: expected 1, found 0
 --> foo.rs:5:19
  |
5 | impl Iterator for Doubler {
  |                   ^^^^^^^ expected 1 type argument

OK, that makes sense. Doubler itself isn't a type until we give it its parameters. Let's do that:

impl Iterator for Doubler<I> {
}

We get two error messages. Feel free to look at the second if you like, but it's not terribly helpful. (Recommendation: always look at the first error message first and try to solve that before moving on.) The first error message is:

error[E0412]: cannot find type `I` in this scope
 --> foo.rs:5:27
  |
5 | impl Iterator for Doubler<I> {
  |                           ^ not found in this scope

OK, what's happening? When we provide an implementation, we need to state all of the type variables we want upfront. So let's do this:

impl<I> Iterator for Doubler<I> {
}

That may look a bit redundant (it did to me at first), but eventually you'll get to cases where things are more complicated and the two sets of angle brackets don't look identical. (For Haskellers or PureScript users, this is kind of like requiring an explicit forall.)

Alright, now we've got something closer, and the compiler is upset that we haven't given type Item and next. Let's go ahead and return a u32 again:

type Item = u32;
fn next(&mut self) -> Option<u32> {
    unimplemented!()
}

The compiles and runs, and then crashes because of the unimplemented!. Great, progress! The trick here is we want to ask the underlying Iterator for its next value. We'll do this with some explicit pattern matching (functional programmers: yes, there's a map method on Option we could use here).

fn next(&mut self) -> Option<u32> {
    match self.iter.next() {
        None => None,
        Some(x) => Some(x * 2),
    }
}

Nice enough, but when we compile it, we get told:

error[E0599]: no method named `next` found for type `I` in the current scope
 --> foo.rs:8:25
  |
8 |         match self.iter.next() {
  |                         ^^^^
  |
  = help: items from traits can only be used if the trait is implemented and in scope
  = note: the following traits define an item `next`, perhaps you need to implement one of them:
          candidate #1: `std::iter::Iterator`
          candidate #2: `std::str::pattern::Searcher`

The compiler knows that we might mean the next method from Iterator. But it doesn't use it. Why, you might ask? Because we never told the compiler that the implementation exists! We need to indicate that the I parameter must have an Iterator implementation.

impl<I: Iterator> Iterator for Doubler<I>

That's some new syntax, but pretty straightforward: I must have an implementation of Iterator. Unfortunately, we're not out of the woods quite yet:

error[E0369]: binary operation `*` cannot be applied to type `<I as std::iter::Iterator>::Item`
  --> foo.rs:10:29
   |
10 |             Some(x) => Some(x * 2),
   |                             ^^^^^
   |
   = note: an implementation of `std::ops::Mul` might be missing for `<I as std::iter::Iterator>::Item`

Let's talk this through. I is some Iterator, we've already established that. And we know that the x value we use in x * 2 will be of whatever type the Item associated type for that I is. The problem is: we have no idea what it is, or whether or not it can be multiplied!

We've already said we're going to produce u32s here, so can we just enforce that the Item is a u32? Yes!

impl<I: Iterator<Item=u32>> Iterator for Doubler<I>

Whew, our code works!

Alternative syntax: where

As our constraints get more complex, shoving them all into the parameters at the beginning of impl starts to feel crowded. You can alternatively use where for this:

impl<I> Iterator for Doubler<I>
    where
    I: Iterator<Item=u32>

There's a subjective point at which people decide to make that transition. Personally, I prefer consistency over brevity, and almost always use where. Your mileage may vary. You should be aware of both syntaxes for reading other people's code.

Not just u32

It's a bit weird that we're tied down to u32s. What if we change our main funciton to have:

let orig_iter = 1..11u64;

We'll get a compiler error:

error[E0271]: type mismatch resolving `<std::ops::Range<u64> as std::iter::Iterator>::Item == u32`
  --> foo.rs:23:14
   |
23 |     for i in doubled_iter {
   |              ^^^^^^^^^^^^ expected u64, found u32
   |
   = note: expected type `u64`
              found type `u32`

It's possible to relax this, but it starts to get more complicated. But let's do it! We'll need to remove all of the references to u32 in our implementation. Here's a first stab at this:

impl<I> Iterator for Doubler<I>
    where
    I: Iterator
{
    type Item = ???;
    fn next(&mut self) -> Option<Self::Item> {
        match self.iter.next() {
            None => None,
            Some(x) => Some(x * 2),
        }
    }
}

I've replaced Option<u32> with Option<Self::Item>, and removed the <Item = u32> on the I: Iterator. But what should we use for type Item =? We want it to be the same type as the underlying iterator's Item... so let's just say that!

type Item = I::Item;

That works! We're still not compiling though, because Rust doesn't know that it can perform multiplication on I::Item. Fortunately, there's a trait for things that can be multiplied called Mul. We can add in:

where
I: Iterator,
I::Item: std::ops::Mul,

New error message:

error[E0308]: mismatched types
  --> foo.rs:14:29
   |
14 |             Some(x) => Some(x * From::from(2u8)),
   |                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ expected std::iter::Iterator::Item, found std::ops::Mul::Output
   |
   = note: expected type `<I as std::iter::Iterator>::Item`
              found type `<<I as std::iter::Iterator>::Item as std::ops::Mul>::Output`

It turns out that Mul has an associated type for its output. This is useful for expressing more complicated relationships at the type level. For example, we can define types for Force, Mass, and Acceleration, and then define a Mul implementation that says Mass times Acceleration produces a Force.

That's a wonderful feature, but it's getting in our way here. We want to say "the output should be the same as the item itself." Fair enough:

impl<I> Iterator for Doubler<I>
    where
    I: Iterator,
    I::Item: std::ops::Mul<Output=I::Item>,

And now:

error[E0308]: mismatched types
  --> foo.rs:14:33
   |
14 |             Some(x) => Some(x * 2),
   |                                 ^ expected associated type, found integral variable
   |
   = note: expected type `<I as std::iter::Iterator>::Item`
              found type `{integer}`

Ugh. We have 2, which can be some integral type. But we don't know that Item is an integral type! I'm not aware of a way to give a constraint that allows this code to work (if someone knows better, please let me know and I'll update this text). One trick that does work is to upcast from a u8 using the From trait, which performs safe numeric conversions (which cannot over or underflow):

impl<I> Iterator for Doubler<I>
    where
    I: Iterator,
    I::Item: std::ops::Mul<Output=I::Item> + From<u8>,
{
    type Item = I::Item;
    fn next(&mut self) -> Option<Self::Item> {
        match self.iter.next() {
            None => None,
            Some(x) => Some(x * From::from(2u8)),
        }
    }
}

Whew, that's finally over!

Exercise 4 An easier approach to the above is to use x + x instead of x * 2. Rewrite the iterator to do that. One hint: the compiler won't know that it's allowed to make copies of that type unless you tell it via the appropriately-named trait.

Recap

That was a lot! But hopefully it gets the idea across of how iterators work. We can write highly generic adapters that work with many kinds of input. You could apply Doubler to the range iterator as we did. You could apply it to the Empty we defined earlier. Or to dozens of other things.

You may notice that the types of these iterators seem to grow as you add more things to them. That's absolutely true, and it's also by design. By representing the full type statically, the compiler is able to see all of the actions that are being performed in a pipeline of iterator operations, and optimize things very well.

More idiomatic

The Doubler we wrote was not idiomatic at all. Let's do it the real way:

fn main() {
    for i in (1..11).map(|x| x * 2) {
        println!("{}", i);
    }
}

The Iterator trait includes many helper methods, so you can chain up large sets of actions like that:

fn main() {
    for i in (1..11).skip(3).map(|x| x + 1).filter(|x| x % 2 == 0) {
        println!("{}", i);
    }
}

You could of course write something like this as a for loop in C/C++, but:

• It would be harder to see the logic
• It would be harder to extend in the future
• It wouldn't be faster: the Rust compiler will optimize case like this down to the same hand-rolled loop you may write

Collecting results

You can collect the results from an iterator in a vector:

fn main() {
    let my_vec: Vec<u32> = (1..11).collect();
    println!("{:?}", my_vec);
}

The type annotation is necessary here, since collect can work on many different datatypes.

Exercise 5 Use the fold method to get the sum of the numbers from 1 to 10. Extra credit: write a helper sum function.

Next time

We've been dancing around closures for quite a while now, including in that last exercise. We now know enough to attack them head on. We'll do so next time.

You're now at a point where you can write some real Rust applications and start cutting your teeth. I'd recommend finding a few play tasks you want to experiment with. Exercism may be a good choice if you're looking for some challenges.

Rust at FP Complete | Introduction