Enums

The enum keyword allows the creation of a type which has a few different variants:

#[derive(Debug)]
enum Direction {
    Left,
    Right,
}

#[derive(Debug)]
enum PlayerMove {
    Pass,                        // Simple variant
    Run(Direction),              // Tuple variant
    Teleport { x: u32, y: u32 }, // Struct variant
}

fn main() {
    let player_move: PlayerMove = PlayerMove::Run(Direction::Left);
    println!("On this turn: {player_move:?}");
}
This slide should take about 5 minutes.

Key Points:

  • Enumerations allow you to collect a set of values under one type.
  • Direction is a type with variants. There are two values of Direction: Direction::Left and Direction::Right.
  • PlayerMove is a type with three variants. In addition to the payloads, Rust will store a discriminant so that it knows at runtime which variant is in a PlayerMove value.
  • This might be a good time to compare structs and enums:
    • In both, you can have a simple version without fields (unit struct) or one with different types of fields (variant payloads).
    • You could even implement the different variants of an enum with separate structs but then they wouldn’t be the same type as they would if they were all defined in an enum.
  • Rust uses minimal space to store the discriminant.

    • If necessary, it stores an integer of the smallest required size

    • If the allowed variant values do not cover all bit patterns, it will use invalid bit patterns to encode the discriminant (the "niche optimization"). For example, Option<&u8> stores either a pointer to an integer or NULL for the None variant.

    • You can control the discriminant if needed (e.g., for compatibility with C):

      #[repr(u32)]
enum Bar {
    A, // 0
    B = 10000,
    C, // 10001
}

fn main() {
    println!("A: {}", Bar::A as u32);
    println!("B: {}", Bar::B as u32);
    println!("C: {}", Bar::C as u32);
}

      Without repr, the discriminant type takes 2 bytes, because 10001 fits 2 bytes.

More to Explore

Rust has several optimizations it can employ to make enums take up less space.

  • Null pointer optimization: For some types, Rust guarantees that size_of::<T>() equals size_of::<Option<T>>().

    Example code if you want to show how the bitwise representation may look like in practice. It's important to note that the compiler provides no guarantees regarding this representation, therefore this is totally unsafe.

    use std::mem::transmute;

macro_rules! dbg_bits {
    ($e:expr, $bit_type:ty) => {
        println!("- {}: {:#x}", stringify!($e), transmute::<_, $bit_type>($e));
    };
}

fn main() {
    unsafe {
        println!("bool:");
        dbg_bits!(false, u8);
        dbg_bits!(true, u8);

        println!("Option<bool>:");
        dbg_bits!(None::<bool>, u8);
        dbg_bits!(Some(false), u8);
        dbg_bits!(Some(true), u8);

        println!("Option<Option<bool>>:");
        dbg_bits!(Some(Some(false)), u8);
        dbg_bits!(Some(Some(true)), u8);
        dbg_bits!(Some(None::<bool>), u8);
        dbg_bits!(None::<Option<bool>>, u8);

        println!("Option<&i32>:");
        dbg_bits!(None::<&i32>, usize);
        dbg_bits!(Some(&0i32), usize);
    }
}