Rust Quick Start Guide

Traits

A trait is a name and formal definition for a specific bit of functionality that a data type may provide. Previously, we've talked about how data types might have the Copy trait, and how, when they do, the compiler copies them instead of moving them. That is the general idea: when a trait is implemented for a data type, that data type gains the ability to interact with the rest of the program in some specific way.

Some of the built-in traits, such as Copy, actually affect how the compiler interacts with the type, but we're more interested in creating our own traits here. We'll talk about those built-in traits in a later chapter.

That's all very abstract, so let's get more concrete by looking at the same "driving directions" problem ...