9.11 Summary

In this chapter, you explored structs, a core aspect of Rust’s type system. Structs let you bundle related data in a logical and safe manner, and Rust’s ownership and borrowing rules ensure robust memory management. We covered:

  • Defining and instantiating structs, including how mutability works
  • Updating struct instances, using shorthand syntax and default values
  • Tuple structs and unit-like structs, more specialized forms of structs
  • Methods and associated functions, and the various ways to handle self
  • Getters and setters for controlled field access
  • Ownership considerations in structs, ensuring memory safety
  • Lifetimes in structs, so references remain valid
  • Generic structs, enabling code reuse for multiple types
  • Comparisons with OOP, highlighting Rust’s approach without inheritance
  • Derived traits, providing behaviors like debugging and equality automatically
  • Visibility, and how Rust controls access with modules and the pub keyword

Understanding structs is crucial to writing safe, efficient, and organized Rust code. They also form a solid foundation for learning about enums, pattern matching, and traits.