Mastering Rust - Second Edition

Abstracting behavior with traits

From a polymorphism and code reuse perspective, it is often a good idea to separate shared behavior and common properties of types from themselves in code and only have methods that are unique to themselves. In doing so, we allow different types to relate to each other with these common properties, which allows us to program for APIs that are more general or inclusive in terms of their parameters. This means that we can accept types that have those shared properties while not being restricted to one particular type.

In object-oriented languages such as Java or C#, interfaces convey the same idea, where we can define shared behavior that many types can implement. For example, instead of having multiple sort ...