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Iterator

The Iterator trait supports iterating over values in a collection. It requires a next method and provides lots of methods. Many standard library types implement Iterator, and you can implement it yourself, too:

struct Fibonacci {
    curr: u32,
    next: u32,
}

impl Iterator for Fibonacci {
    type Item = u32;

    fn next(&mut self) -> Option<Self::Item> {
        let new_next = self.curr + self.next;
        self.curr = self.next;
        self.next = new_next;
        Some(self.curr)
    }
}

fn main() {
    let fib = Fibonacci { curr: 0, next: 1 };
    for (i, n) in fib.enumerate().take(5) {
        println!("fib({i}): {n}");
    }
}
This slide should take about 5 minutes.

  • The Iterator trait implements many common functional programming operations over collections (e.g. map, filter, reduce, etc). This is the trait where you can find all the documentation about them. In Rust these functions should produce the code as efficient as equivalent imperative implementations.

  • IntoIterator is the trait that makes for loops work. It is implemented by collection types such as Vec<T> and references to them such as &Vec<T> and &[T]. Ranges also implement it. This is why you can iterate over a vector with for i in some_vec { .. } but some_vec.next() doesn’t exist.