Is there a faster/shorter way to initialize variables in a Rust struct?

Question

In the following example, I would much prefer to assign a value to each field in the struct in the declaration of the fields. Alternatively, it effectively takes one additional statement for each field to assign a value to the fields. All I want to be able to do is to assign default values when the struct is instantiated.

Is there a more succinct way of doing this?

struct cParams {
    iInsertMax: i64,
    iUpdateMax: i64,
    iDeleteMax: i64,
    iInstanceMax: i64,
    tFirstInstance: bool,
    tCreateTables: bool,
    tContinue: bool,
}

impl cParams {
    fn new() -> cParams {
        cParams {
            iInsertMax: -1,
            iUpdateMax: -1,
            iDeleteMax: -1,
            iInstanceMax: -1,
            tFirstInstance: false,
            tCreateTables: false,
            tContinue: false,
        }
    }
}

Zargony Zargony · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-29T08:45:03

You can provide default values for your struct by implementing the Default trait. The default function would look like your current new function:

impl Default for cParams {
    fn default() -> cParams {
        cParams {
            iInsertMax: -1,
            iUpdateMax: -1,
            iDeleteMax: -1,
            iInstanceMax: -1,
            tFirstInstance: false,
            tCreateTables: false,
            tContinue: false,
        }
    }
}

You can then instantiate the struct by giving only the non-default values:

let p = cParams { iInsertMax: 10, ..Default::default() };

With some minor changes to your data structure, you can take advantage of an automatically derived default implementation. If you use #[derive(Default)] on a data structure, the compiler will automatically create a default function for you that fills each field with its default value. The default boolean value is false, the default integral value is 0.

An integer's default value being 0 is a problem here since you want the integer fields to be -1 by default. You could define a new type that implements a default value of -1 and use that instead of i64 in your struct. (I haven't tested that, but it should work).

However, I'd suggest to slightly change your data structure and use Option<i64> instead of i64. I don't know the context of your code, but it looks like you're using the special value of -1 to represent the special meaning "infinite", or "there's no max". In Rust, we use an Option to represent an optionally present value. There's no need for a -1 hack. An option can be either None or Some(x) where x would be your i64 here. It might even be an unsigned integer if -1 was the only negative value. The default Option value is None, so with the proposed changes, your code could look like this:

#[derive(Default)]
struct cParams {
    iInsertMax: Option<u64>,
    iUpdateMax: Option<u64>,
    iDeleteMax: Option<u64>,
    iInstanceMax: Option<u64>,
    tFirstInstance: bool,
    tCreateTables: bool,
    tContinue: bool,
}

let p = cParams { iInsertMax: Some(10), ..Default::default() };

Is there a faster/shorter way to initialize variables in a Rust struct?

1 Answers