The thing with OOP, particularly how it's used in GCed languages, is that it's all about handing references out to wherever and then dealing with the complexity of not knowing who has access to your fields via getters & setters, or by cloning memory whenever it's modified in asynchronous code.
Rust has quite the opposite mindset. It's all about tracking where references go. It pushes your code to be very tree-shaped, i.e. references typically¹ only exist between a function and the functions it calls underneath. This is what allows asynchronous code to be safe in Rust, and I would also argue that the tree shape makes code easier to understand, too.
But yeah, some of the patterns you might know from OOP will not work in Rust for that reason. You will likely need to get into a different mindset over time.
Also just in case: We are talking OOP in the sense of the paradigm, i.e. object-oriented.
Just using objects, i.e. data with associated functions/methods, that works completely normal in Rust.
¹) If you genuinely need references that reach outside the tree shape, which is mostly going to be the case, if you work with multiple threads, then you can do so by wrapping your data structures in Arc<Mutex<_>>
or similar. But yeah, when learning, you should try to solve your problems without these. Most programs don't need them.
Yeah, these become a lot less relevant with routine.
Avoiding the main-thread panicking is mostly just a matter of not using
.unwrap()
and.expect()
.String
vs.&str
can mostly be solved by generally using owned datatypes (String
) for storing in structs and using references (&str
) for passing into function parameters. It does still happen that you forget the&
at times, but that's then trivial to solve (by just adding the&
)."temporary value dropped while borrowed" can generally be avoided by not passing references outside of your scope/function. You want to pass the owned value outside. Clone, if you have to.
"missing lifetime specifier" is also largely solved by not storing references in structs.