Programming Rust

Chapter 16. Collections

We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence.

James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

The Rust standard library contains several collections, generic types for storing data in memory. We’ve already been using collections, such as Vec and HashMap, throughout this book. In this chapter, we’ll cover the methods of these two types in detail, along with the other half-dozen standard collections. Before we begin, let’s address a few systematic differences between Rust’s collections and those in other languages.

First, moves and borrowing are everywhere. Rust uses moves to avoid deep-copying values. That’s why the method Vec<T>::push(item) takes its argument by value, not by reference. The value is moved into the vector. The diagrams in Chapter 4 show how this works out in practice: pushing a Rust String to a Vec<String> is quick, because Rust doesn’t have to copy the string’s character data, and ownership of the string is always clear.

Second, Rust doesn’t have invalidation errors—the kind of dangling-pointer bug where a collection ...