2.2 KiB
Nullability
Our implementation of the assigned
method is fairly blunt: panicking for to-do and done tickets is far from ideal.
We can do better using Rust's Option
type.
Option
Option
is a Rust type that represents nullable values.
It is an enum, defined in Rust's standard library:
enum Option<T> {
Some(T),
None,
}
Option
encodes the idea that a value might be present (Some(T)
) or absent (None
).
It also forces you to explicitly handle both cases. You'll get a compiler error if you are working with
a nullable value and you forget to handle the None
case.
This is a significant improvement over "implicit" nullability in other languages, where you can forget to check
for null
and thus trigger a runtime error.
Option
's definition
Option
's definition uses a Rust construct that you haven't seen before: tuple-like variants.
Tuple-like variants
Option
has two variants: Some(T)
and None
.
Some
is a tuple-like variant: it's a variant that holds unnamed fields.
Tuple-like variants are often used when there is a single field to store, especially when we're looking at a
"wrapper" type like Option
.
Tuple-like structs
They're not specific to enums—you can define tuple-like structs too:
struct Point(i32, i32);
You can then access the two fields of a Point
instance using their positional index:
let point = Point(3, 4);
let x = point.0;
let y = point.1;
Tuples
It's weird to say that something is tuple-like when we haven't seen tuples yet!
Tuples are another example of a primitive Rust type.
They group together a fixed number of values with (potentially different) types:
// Two values, same type
let first: (i32, i32) = (3, 4);
// Three values, different types
let second: (i32, u32, u8) = (-42, 3, 8);
The syntax is simple: you list the types of the values between parentheses, separated by commas. You can access the fields of a tuple using the dot notation and the field index:
assert_eq!(second.0, -42);
assert_eq!(second.1, 3);
assert_eq!(second.2, 8);
Tuples are a convenient way of grouping values together when you can't be bothered to define a dedicated struct type.