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The Rust Programming Handbook
book

The Rust Programming Handbook

by Francesco Ciulla
December 2025
Beginner
768 pages
15h 34m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from The Rust Programming Handbook

7

Polymorphism and Lifetimes

We have spent the previous chapters defining concrete types such as structs and enums. These are excellent for modeling specific data, but real-world software often requires more flexibility! In real-world scenarios, we often need functions that can accept different types of data as long as they behave in a certain way.

In computer science, this concept is known as polymorphism. In Rust, we achieve this primarily through traits and generics. We will also cover lifetimes, which are a special form of generics that ensures references remain valid while our code becomes more abstract.

Ad hoc polymorphism: defining behavior with traits

The first step toward writing flexible code is changing how we view our data. Instead ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781836208877