Rust Programming By Example

Matching

It's common to use pattern matching through match blocks in Rust. However, it's often a better solution to use if let conditions. Let's take a simple example:

enum SomeEnum {
    Ok,
    Err,
    Unknown,
}

Now let's say you want to perform an action only when you get Ok. With a match, you would do this:

let x = SomeEnum::Err;

match x {
    SomeEnum::Ok => {
        // Huge code doing a lot of things...
    }
    _ => {}
}

Not really an issue, right? Now let's see it with an if let:

let x = SomeEnum::Err;

if let SomeEnum::Ok = x {
    // Huge code doing a lot of things...
}

And that's it. It basically makes the code a little shorter, while improving readability a lot. Whenever you just need to get one value, it's often a better solution to use if let instead of match ...