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Rework generic fn examples to show monomorphized versions (#2671)
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Something I always do when covering generic fns is I like to show the
monomorphized versions of `pick` to make it clear to students what
generics are doing behind the scenes. In my most recent class I tried
going the other way around, showing the monomorphized versions first to
more clearly motivate what generics are used for, and I liked the way it
went. I think motivating generics by first showing code duplication and
then showing how generics allow us to de-duplicate makes for a good
teaching flow, and I think it also helps make things clearer to students
coming from more dynamic languages that don't have an equivalent to
generics.

I also changed the `pick` fns to take a `bool` as the first argument
because I think that makes things slightly clearer/cleaner, but I'm not
married to that change either.
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randomPoison authored Mar 3, 2025
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38 changes: 30 additions & 8 deletions src/generics/generic-functions.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -8,26 +8,48 @@ Rust supports generics, which lets you abstract algorithms or data structures
(such as sorting or a binary tree) over the types used or stored.

```rust,editable
/// Pick `even` or `odd` depending on the value of `n`.
fn pick<T>(n: i32, even: T, odd: T) -> T {
if n % 2 == 0 {
even
fn pick<T>(cond: bool, left: T, right: T) -> T {
if cond {
left
} else {
odd
right
}
}
fn main() {
println!("picked a number: {:?}", pick(97, 222, 333));
println!("picked a string: {:?}", pick(28, "dog", "cat"));
println!("picked a number: {:?}", pick(true, 222, 333));
println!("picked a string: {:?}", pick(false, 'L', 'R'));
}
```

<details>

- It can be helpful to show the monomorphized versions of `pick`, either before
talking about the generic `pick` in order to show how generics can reduce code
duplication, or after talking about generics to show how monomorphization
works.

```rust
fn pick_i32(cond: bool, left: i32, right: i32) -> i32 {
if cond {
left
} else {
right
}
}

fn pick_char(cond: bool, left: char, right: char) -> char {
if cond {
left
} else {
right
}
}
```

- Rust infers a type for T based on the types of the arguments and return value.

- In this example we only use the primitive types `i32` and `&str` for `T`, but
- In this example we only use the primitive types `i32` and `char` for `T`, but
we can use any type here, including user-defined types:

```rust,ignore
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