Rollup merge of #24675 - steveklabnik:two_more_chapters, r=alexcrichton

Two more chapters of TRPL. The `type` one is pretty straightforward, but I wasn't really sure what to put for unsized types. I just explained the very basics, and the special bounds syntax. Thoughts on what else should go here?

r? @alexcrichton
This commit is contained in:
Manish Goregaokar 2015-04-23 03:21:02 +05:30
commit bd8101d698
2 changed files with 130 additions and 2 deletions

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% `type` Aliases
Coming soon
The `type` keyword lets you declare an alias of another type:
```rust
type Name = String;
```
You can then use this type as if it were a real type:
```rust
type Name = String;
let x: Name = "Hello".to_string();
```
Note, however, that this is an _alias_, not a new type entirely. In other
words, because Rust is strongly typed, youd expect a comparison between two
different types to fail:
```rust,ignore
let x: i32 = 5;
let y: i64 = 5;
if x == y {
// ...
}
```
this gives
```text
error: mismatched types:
expected `i32`,
found `i64`
(expected i32,
found i64) [E0308]
if x == y {
^
```
But, if we had an alias:
```rust
type Num = i32;
let x: i32 = 5;
let y: Num = 5;
if x == y {
// ...
}
```
This compiles without error. Values of a `Num` type are the same as a value of
type `i32`, in every way.
You can also use type aliases with generics:
```rust
use std::result;
enum ConcreteError {
Foo,
Bar,
}
type Result<T> = result::Result<T, ConcreteError>;
```
This creates a specialized version of the `Result` type, which always has a
`ConcreteError` for the `E` part of `Result<T, E>`. This is commonly used
in the standard library to create custom errors for each subsection. For
example, [io::Result][ioresult].
[ioresult]: ../std/io/type.Result.html

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% Unsized Types
Coming Soon!
Most types have a particular size, in bytes, that is knowable at compile time.
For example, an `i32` is thirty-two bits big, or four bytes. However, there are
some types which are useful to express, but do not have a defined size. These are
called unsized or dynamically sized types. One example is `[T]`. This type
represents a certain number of `T` in sequence. But we dont know how many
there are, so the size is not known.
Rust understands a few of these types, but they have some restrictions. There
are three:
1. We can only manipulate an instance of an unsized type via a pointer. An
`&[T]` works just fine, but a `[T]` does not.
2. Variables and arguments cannot have dynamically sized types.
3. Only the last field in a `struct` may have a dynamically sized type; the
other fields must not. Enum variants must not have dynamically sized types as
data.
So why bother? Well, because `[T]` can only be used behind a pointer, if we
didnt have language support for unsized types, it would be impossible to write
this:
```rust,ignore
impl Foo for str {
```
or
```rust,ignore
impl<T> Foo for [T] {
```
Instead, you would have to write:
```rust,ignore
impl Foo for &str {
```
Meaning, this implementation would only work for [references][ref], and not
other types of pointers. With this `impl`, all pointers, including (at some
point, there are some bugs to fix first) user-defined custom smart pointers,
can use this `impl`.
# ?Sized
If you want to write a function that accepts a dynamically sized type, you
can use the special bound, `?Sized`:
```rust
struct Foo<T: ?Sized> {
f: T,
}
```
This `?`, read as “T may be `Sized`”, means that this bound is special: it
lets us match more kinds, not less. Its almost like every `T` implicitly has
`T: Sized`, and the `?` undoes this default.