Enums

An enum in Rust is a type that represents data that is one of several possible variants. Each variant in the enum can optionally have data associated with it:

enum Message {
    Quit,
    ChangeColor(i32, i32, i32),
    Move { x: i32, y: i32 },
    Write(String),
}

The syntax for defining variants resembles the syntaxes used to define structs: you can have variants with no data (like unit-like structs), variants with named data, and variants with unnamed data (like tuple structs). Unlike separate struct definitions, however, an enum is a single type. A value of the enum can match any of the variants. For this reason, an enum is sometimes called a ‘sum type’: the set of possible values of the enum is the sum of the sets of possible values for each variant.

We use the :: syntax to use the name of each variant: they’re scoped by the name of the enum itself. This allows both of these to work:

# enum Message {
#     Move { x: i32, y: i32 },
# }
let x: Message = Message::Move { x: 3, y: 4 };

enum BoardGameTurn {
    Move { squares: i32 },
    Pass,
}

let y: BoardGameTurn = BoardGameTurn::Move { squares: 1 };

Both variants are named Move, but since they’re scoped to the name of the enum, they can both be used without conflict.

A value of an enum type contains information about which variant it is, in addition to any data associated with that variant. This is sometimes referred to as a ‘tagged union’, since the data includes a ‘tag’ indicating what type it is. The compiler uses this information to enforce that you’re accessing the data in the enum safely. For instance, you can’t simply try to destructure a value as if it were one of the possible variants:

fn process_color_change(msg: Message) {
    let Message::ChangeColor(r, g, b) = msg; // compile-time error
}

Not supporting these operations may seem rather limiting, but it’s a limitation which we can overcome. There are two ways: by implementing equality ourselves, or by pattern matching variants with [match]match expressions, which you’ll learn in the next section. We don’t know enough about Rust to implement equality yet, but we’ll find out in the [traits]traits section.

Constructors as functions

An enum constructor can also be used like a function. For example:

# enum Message {
# Write(String),
# }
let m = Message::Write("Hello, world".to_string());

is the same as

# enum Message {
# Write(String),
# }
fn foo(x: String) -> Message {
    Message::Write(x)
}

let x = foo("Hello, world".to_string());

This is not immediately useful to us, but when we get to [closures]closures, we’ll talk about passing functions as arguments to other functions. For example, with [iterators]iterators, we can do this to convert a vector of Strings into a vector of Message::Writes:

# enum Message {
# Write(String),
# }

let v = vec!["Hello".to_string(), "World".to_string()];

let v1: Vec<Message> = v.into_iter().map(Message::Write).collect();