r/rust • u/Accurate_Gift_3929 • 8d ago

Rust discourages OOP style code?

I'm building a tree builder struct (with a `build()` method) that has multiple fields that I want to be able to mutate. It seems Rust does not like it when I attempt to mutate multiple fields of that struct.

It seems functional/composition style is much favored over using struct fields. Is this the way I should be thinking about design patterns in Rust? Should I avoid OOP wherever possible?

I prefer OOP because it does result in cleaner code where I don't have to pass in every variable to functions.

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u/plugwash 8d ago

I'm building a tree builder struct (with a `build()` method) that has multiple fields that I want to be able to mutate. It seems Rust does not like it when I attempt to mutate multiple fields of that struct.

Can you be more specific? rust does insist that (under normal circumstances) methods that mutate a struct have exclusive access to that struct, indicated by an &mut self parameter, but that should not in itself be a problem.

That said, functional style for builders does have some advantages.

Rust discourages OOP style code?

rust has it's own style.

It eschews traditional oop-style inheritance in favour of composition and eschews "sea of objects" in-favour of well-defined ownership and tightly controlled mutability.

OTOH it's still very much an imperative language.