Rust Structs compared to Ruby classes

Wait, the title says we are comparing Structs and classes, but Ruby has a Struct object, what gives? It does, we’ll get into it.

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

If you’ve been following along, we haven’t gotten into code structure yet. We’ve scratched the surface of classes and objects in the last post about Enums but in this post, we’re going to lay out the foundation of “classes” in Rust compared to Ruby.

In the Enum post, we created a User class in Ruby with some constants that offered us a way to illustrate an equivalent to Rust Enums. The class and output looked like this:

class User
    USER_KINDS = [Admin, NonAdmin]
    USER_SCORES = [HighScore, LowScore]
    USER_CONTACTS = [Electronic, Physical]

    attr_accessor :kind, :high_score, :low_score, :contact

    def self.admin
      USER_KINDS.first
    end

    def self.nonadmin
      USER_KINDS.last
    end
	
    def self.high_score(value)
      USER_SCORES.first.new(value)
    end

    def self.low_score(value)
      USER_SCORES.last.new(value)
    end

    def self.contact(email:, text:, city:, state:)
      if !email.nil? || !text.nil?
        USER_CONTACTS.first.new(email: email, text: text)
      elsif !city.nil? || !state.nil? 
        USER_CONTACTS.last.new(city: city, state: state)
      end
    end
end

my_user = User.new
my_user.kind = User.admin
my_user.low_score = User.low_score(30)…