Lecture 6: Traits and Generics

Reminders (March 4)

• Homework 2 due today!

• Remember to email before the deadline to use late days (either the 4 freebies or additional late days) -- so that we make sure to delay grading your assignment.

Reminders (March 18)

• Add/drop deadline tomorrrow! Hoping to get grades back by then.

• Homework 3 later than initially planned. Will be posted soon, likely due April 1.

Outline of lecture

Part 1 (March 4)

Traits: Traits are like Copy, Clone, Debug, and Eq. Traits define shared behavior across different types.

• Implementing a trait for a type

• Overview of standard library traits

Part 2 (March 18)

Traits continued:

• More advanced (e.g. Deref, StructOpt, Serde)

• Defining your own traits

Generics:

Generics are like Vec<T>. Generics are how you generalize data structures and functions, making them work for different parameter types.

• Writing generic functions

• Making structs (and their methods) generic

• Using traits to enable truly generic programming

Additional Material

Some additional utility traits are described in the optional material more_utility_traits.rs, to complement what we discussed in class.