Mastering Rust - Second Edition

Dispatch

Dispatch is a concept that emerged from the object-oriented programming paradigm, mainly in the context of one of its features called polymorphism. In the context of OOP, when APIs are generic or take parameters implementing an interface, it here has to figure out what method implementation to invoke on an instance of a type that's passed to the API. This process of method resolution in a polymorphic context is called dispatch, and invoking the method is called dispatching. In mainstream languages that support polymorphism, the dispatch may happen in either of the following ways:

• Static dispatch: When the method to invoke is decided at compile time, it is known as static dispatch or early binding. The method's signature is used ...