Book Image

Hands-On Functional Programming in Rust

By : Andrew Johnson
Book Image

Hands-On Functional Programming in Rust

By: Andrew Johnson

Overview of this book

Functional programming allows developers to divide programs into smaller, reusable components that ease the creation, testing, and maintenance of software as a whole. Combined with the power of Rust, you can develop robust and scalable applications that fulfill modern day software requirements. This book will help you discover all the Rust features that can be used to build software in a functional way. We begin with a brief comparison of the functional and object-oriented approach to different problems and patterns. We then quickly look at the patterns of control flow, data the abstractions of these unique to functional programming. The next part covers how to create functional apps in Rust; mutability and ownership, which are exclusive to Rust, are also discussed. Pure functions are examined next and you'll master closures, their various types, and currying. We also look at implementing concurrency through functional design principles and metaprogramming using macros. Finally, we look at best practices for debugging and optimization. By the end of the book, you will be familiar with the functional approach of programming and will be able to use these techniques on a daily basis.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Using the monad pattern

A monad defines return and bind operations for a type. The return operation is like a constructor to make the monad. The bind operation incorporates new information and returns a new monad. There are also several laws that monads should obey. Rather than quote the laws, we'll just say that monads should behave well when daisy chained like the following:

MyMonad::return(value)  //We start with a new MyMonad<A>
.bind(|x| x+x) //We take a step into MyMonad<B>
.bind(|y| y*y); //Similarly we get to MyMonad<C>

In Rust, there are several semi-monads that appear in standard libraries:

fn main()
{
let v1 = Some(2).and_then(|x| Some(x+x)).and_then(|y| Some(y*y));
println!("{:?}", v1);

let v2 = None.or_else(|| None).or_else(|| Some(222));
println!("{:?}", v2);
}

In this example, the normal Option constructors...