Introduction

Participation

If you are interested in contributing to this book, check out the contribution guidelines.

Design patterns

In software development, we often come across problems that share similarities regardless of the environment they appear in. Although the implementation details are crucial to solve the task at hand, we may abstract from these particularities to find the common practices that are generically applicable.

Design patterns are a collection of reusable and tested solutions to recurring problems in engineering. They make our software more modular, maintainable, and extensible. Moreover, these patterns provide a common language for developers to use, making them an excellent tool for effective communication when problem-solving in teams.

Design patterns in Rust

There are many problems that share the same form. Due to the fact that Rust is not object-oriented, design patterns vary with respect to other object-oriented programming languages. While the details are different, since they have the same form they can be solved using the same fundamental methods:

• Design patterns are methods to solve common problems when writing software.
• Anti-patterns are methods to solve these same common problems. However, while design patterns give us benefits, anti-patterns create more problems.
• Idioms are guidelines to follow when coding. They are social norms of the community. You can break them, but if you do you should have a good reason for it.

TODO: Mention why Rust is a bit special - functional elements, type system, borrow checker