Vec

Vec is the standard resizable heap-allocated buffer:

fn main() {
    let mut v1 = Vec::new();
    v1.push(42);
    println!("v1: len = {}, capacity = {}", v1.len(), v1.capacity());

    let mut v2 = Vec::with_capacity(v1.len() + 1);
    v2.extend(v1.iter());
    v2.push(9999);
    println!("v2: len = {}, capacity = {}", v2.len(), v2.capacity());

    // Canonical macro to initialize a vector with elements.
    let mut v3 = vec![0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4];

    // Retain only the even elements.
    v3.retain(|x| x % 2 == 0);
    println!("{v3:?}");

    // Remove consecutive duplicates.
    v3.dedup();
    println!("{v3:?}");
}

Vec implements Deref<Target = [T]>, which means that you can call slice methods on a Vec.

This slide should take about 10 minutes.
  • Vec is a type of collection, along with String and HashMap. The data it contains is stored on the heap. This means the amount of data doesn’t need to be known at compile time. It can grow or shrink at runtime.
  • Notice how Vec<T> is a generic type too, but you don’t have to specify T explicitly. As always with Rust type inference, the T was established during the first push call.
  • vec![...] is a canonical macro to use instead of Vec::new() and it supports adding initial elements to the vector.
  • To index the vector you use [ ], but they will panic if out of bounds. Alternatively, using get will return an Option. The pop function will remove the last element.
  • Slices are covered on day 3. For now, students only need to know that a value of type Vec gives access to all of the documented read-only slice methods, too.