A very powerful feature of Rust that is commonly seen when dealing with generics is that it is possible to tell the compiler that a particular type will provide certain functionality. This is provided by a special feature known as a trait.
However, to appreciate traits, we first have to look at the impl keyword (short for implement).
The impl keyword works in a very similar way to a function. The structure of an implementation needs to considered as being closer to a static class (in C#) or as a function within a function:
impl MyImpl
{
fn reference_name (&self) ...
}This would be more for a non-generic type. For generics, the preceding code becomes the following:
impl <T> MyGenericImpl<T>
{
fn reference_name(&self) ...
}Note that the <T> is required to tell the compiler that the impl is for a generic. reference_name is the name used to access the impl function. It can be anything you wish.