I lived in a perfect OOP bubble for my entire life. Everything was peaceful and it worked perfectly. When I wanted to move that player, I do player.move(10.0, 0.0); When I want to collect a coin, I go GameMan -> collect_coin(); And when I really need a global method, so be it. I love my C++, I love my python and yes, I also love my GDScript (Godot Game Engine). They all work with classes and objects and it all works perfectly for me.

But oh no! I wanted to learn Rust recently and I really liked how values are non-mutable by defualt and such, but it doesn’t have classes!? What’s going on? How do you even move a player? Do you just HAVE to have a global method for everything? like move_player(); rotate_player(); player_collect_coin(); But no! Even worse! How do you even know which player is meant? Do you just HAVE to pass the player (which is a struct probably) like this? move(player); rotate(player); collect_coin(player, coin); I do not want to live in a world where everything has to be global! I want my data to be organized and to be able to call my methods WHERE I need them, not where they just lie there, waiting to be used in the global scope.

So please, dear C, Rust and… other non OOP language users! Tell me, what makes you stay with these languages? And what is that coding style even called? Is that the “pure functional style” I heard about some time?

Also what text editor do you use (non judgemental)? Vim user here

  • RiskableEnglish
    10•3 months ago

    When you call player.move() are you mutating the state of player or are you really just logically attaching the move() function to the player object in order to keep your code… Logical?

    player could actually be an interface to some object in an external database and move() could be changing a value in that database. Or player could just be a convenient name and place for a collection of “player”-related functions or stranger (yet weirdly common): A workaround for implementing certain programming patterns (Java and C#, I’m looking at you haha).

    In Rust, attaching a function or property is something you do to structs or enums. It carries a very specific meaning that’s much more precise and IMHO more in line with the original ideals of OOP (what they were trying to accomplish) and I think the way it’s implemented (with traits) makes it far more flexible.

    You can define a trait that requires a bunch of types/functions and then any implementation (impl) of a struct or enum that includes them can be said to support that trait. This allows you to write type-safe code that will work in zillions more situations and across many different architectures than you could with traditional OOP languages like C++ or Java.

    It’s the reason why embedded rust is kind of taking the world by storm right now… You really can “write once, run everywhere” thanks to careful forethought from the Rust developers and embedded-hal.

    • Smorty [she/her]OP
      5•3 months ago

      In my case I want to move that player, meaning, changing the position of that player object (probably gonna be a vec3 or vec2). So like this:

      void move(vec2 by){
    this -> position += by;
}

      I will look into impl. They do seem very useful from what I have heard from the other commenters on here. Thank you for contributing and sharing your knowledge!