Rust Object-oriented Rust Inheritance with Traits
Example
In Rust, there is no concept of "inheriting" the properties of a struct. Instead, when you are designing the relationship between objects do it in a way that one's functionality is defined by an interface (a trait in Rust). This promotes composition over inheritance, which is considered more useful and easier to extend to larger projects.
Here's an example using some example inheritance in Python:
class Animal:
def speak(self):
print("The " + self.animal_type + " said " + self.noise)
class Dog(Animal):
def __init__(self):
self.animal_type = 'dog'
self.noise = 'woof'
In order to translate this in to Rust, we need to take out what makes up an animal and put that functionality into traits.
trait Speaks {
fn speak(&self);
fn noise(&self) -> &str;
}
trait Animal {
fn animal_type(&self) -> &str;
}
struct Dog {}
impl Animal for Dog {
fn animal_type(&self) -> &str {
"dog"
}
}
impl Speaks for Dog {
fn speak(&self) {
println!("The dog said {}", self.noise());
}
fn noise(&self) -> &str {
"woof"
}
}
fn main() {
let dog = Dog {};
dog.speak();
}
Note how we broke that abstract parent class into two separate components: the part that defines the struct as an animal, and the part that allows it to speak.
Astute readers will notice this isn't quite one to one, as every implementer has to reimplement the logic to print out a string in the form "The {animal} said {noise}". You can do this with a slight redesign of the interface where we implement Speak for Animal:
trait Speaks {
fn speak(&self);
}
trait Animal {
fn animal_type(&self) -> &str;
fn noise(&self) -> &str;
}
impl<T> Speaks for T where T: Animal {
fn speak(&self) {
println!("The {} said {}", self.animal_type(), self.noise());
}
}
struct Dog {}
struct Cat {}
impl Animal for Dog {
fn animal_type(&self) -> &str {
"dog"
}
fn noise(&self) -> &str {
"woof"
}
}
impl Animal for Cat {
fn animal_type(&self) -> &str {
"cat"
}
fn noise(&self) -> &str {
"meow"
}
}
fn main() {
let dog = Dog {};
let cat = Cat {};
dog.speak();
cat.speak();
}
Notice now the animal makes a noise and speaks simply now has a implementation for anything that is an animal. This is much more flexible than both the previous way and the Python inheritance. For example, if you want to add a Human that has a different sound, we can instead just have another implementation of speak for something Human:
trait Human {
fn name(&self) -> &str;
fn sentence(&self) -> &str;
}
struct Person {}
impl<T> Speaks for T where T: Human {
fn speak(&self) {
println!("{} said {}", self.name(), self.sentence());
}
}
