The Rust Programming Language (Covers Rust 2018)

10GENERIC TYPES, TRAITS, AND LIFETIMES

Every programming language has tools for effectively handling the duplication of concepts. In Rust, one such tool is generics. Generics are abstract stand-ins for concrete types or other properties. When we’re writing code, we can express the behavior of generics or how they relate to other generics without knowing what will be in their place when compiling and running the code.

Similar to the way a function takes parameters with unknown values to run the same code on multiple concrete values, functions can take parameters of some generic type instead of a concrete type, like i32 or String. In fact, we’ve ...