
About
Idiomatic Rust patterns, ownership, error handling, traits, concurrency, and best practices for building safe, performant applications.
name: rust-patterns description: Idiomatic Rust patterns, ownership, error handling, traits, concurrency, and best practices for building safe, performant applications. origin: ECC
Rust Development Patterns
Idiomatic Rust patterns and best practices for building safe, performant, and maintainable applications.
When to Use
- Writing new Rust code
- Reviewing Rust code
- Refactoring existing Rust code
- Designing crate structure and module layout
How It Works
This skill enforces idiomatic Rust conventions across six key areas: ownership and borrowing to prevent data races at compile time, Result/? error propagation with thiserror for libraries and anyhow for applications, enums and exhaustive pattern matching to make illegal states unrepresentable, traits and generics for zero-cost abstraction, safe concurrency via Arc<Mutex<T>>, channels, and async/await, and minimal pub surfaces organized by domain.
Core Principles
1. Ownership and Borrowing
Rust's ownership system prevents data races and memory bugs at compile time.
// Good: Pass references when you don't need ownership
fn process(data: &[u8]) -> usize {
data.len()
}
// Good: Take ownership only when you need to store or consume
fn store(data: Vec<u8>) -> Record {
Record { payload: data }
}
// Bad: Cloning unnecessarily to avoid borrow checker
fn process_bad(data: &Vec<u8>) -> usize {
let cloned = data.clone(); // Wasteful — just borrow
cloned.len()
}
Use Cow for Flexible Ownership
use std::borrow::Cow;
fn normalize(input: &str) -> Cow<'_, str> {
if input.contains(' ') {
Cow::Owned(input.replace(' ', "_"))
} else {
Cow::Borrowed(input) // Zero-cost when no mutation needed
}
}
Error Handling
Use Result and ? — Never unwrap() in Production
// Good: Propagate errors with context
use anyhow::{Context, Result};
fn load_config(path: &str) -> Result<Config> {
let content = std::fs::read_to_string(path)
.with_context(|| format!("failed to read config from {path}"))?;
let config: Config = toml::from_str(&content)
.with_context(|| format!("failed to parse config from {path}"))?;
Ok(config)
}
// Bad: Panics on error
fn load_config_bad(path: &str) -> Config {
let content = std::fs::read_to_string(path).unwrap(); // Panics!
toml::from_str(&content).unwrap()
}
Library Errors with thiserror, Application Errors with anyhow
// Library code: structured, typed errors
use thiserror::Error;
#[derive(Debug, Error)]
pub enum StorageError {
#[error("record not found: {id}")]
NotFound { id: String },
#[error("connection failed")]
Connection(#[from] std::io::Error),
#[error("invalid data: {0}")]
InvalidData(String),
}
// Application code: flexible error handling
use anyhow::{bail, Result};
fn run() -> Result<()> {
let config = load_config("app.toml")?;
if config.workers == 0 {
bail!("worker count must be > 0");
}
Ok(())
}
Option Combinators Over Nested Matching
// Good: Combinator chain
fn find_user_email(users: &[User], id: u64) -> Option<String> {
users.iter()
.find(|u| u.id == id)
.map(|u| u.email.clone())
}
// Bad: Deeply nested matching
fn find_user_email_bad(users: &[User], id: u64) -> Option<String> {
match users.iter().find(|u| u.id == id) {
Some(user) => match &user.email {
email => Some(email.clone()),
},
None => None,
}
}
Enums and Pattern Matching
Model States as Enums
// Good: Impossible states are unrepresentable
enum ConnectionState {
Disconnected,
Connecting { attempt: u32 },
Connected { session_id: String },
Failed { reason: String, retries: u32 },
}
fn handle(state: &ConnectionState) {
match state {
ConnectionState::Disconnected => connect(),
ConnectionState::Connecting { attempt } if *attempt > 3 => abort(),
ConnectionState::Connecting { .. } => wait(),
ConnectionState::Connected { session_id } => use_session(session_id),
ConnectionState::Failed { retries, .. } if *retries < 5 => retry(),
ConnectionState::Failed { reason, .. } => log_failure(reason),
}
}
Exhaustive Matching — No Catch-All for Business Logic
// Good: Handle every variant explicitly
match command {
Command::Start => start_service(),
Command::Stop => stop_service(),
Command::Restart => restart_service(),
// Adding a new variant forces handling here
}
// Bad: Wildcard hides new variants
match command {
Command::Start => start_service(),
_ => {} // Silently ignores Stop, Restart, and future variants
}
Traits and Generics
Accept Generics, Return Concrete Types
// Good: Generic input, concrete output
fn read_all(reader: &mut impl Read) -> std::io::Result<Vec<u8>> {
let mut buf = Vec::new();
reader.rea
