Idiomatic Rust

4 Introductory patterns

This chapter covers

• Understanding resource acquisition is initialization
• Passing arguments by value versus reference
• Using constructors
• Understanding object member visibility and access
• Handling errors
• Global state handling with lazy-static.rs, OnceCell, and static_init

Now we’re ready to dive into some more concrete patterns. We begin by reviewing some elementary topics: RAII, passing values, constructors, and visibility. Then we’ll move on to slightly more complex subjects: error handling and global variables. Although the chapter discusses many topics, it focuses on bite-size patterns, which we’ll use a lot.

This chapter also introduces crates, which are Rust libraries built by the community. The Rust language ...