Rust Module Tutorial
Welcome Rustaceans! In this tutorial, we are going to take a look at Modules in Rust and how you can define your own simple modules.
By the end of this tutorial, we will have covered:
- The absolute basics of modules in Rust
- The rules around defining your own modules
With this in mind, let’s dive in!
Modules in Rust
When you first start learning Rust coming from another programming language, one of the first problems you typically come up against is - “How do I split my code into multiple files?”.
This is where modules come into play. Modules in Rust allow us to split up our code into multiple files so that we can write more readable and maintainable code within our projects.
Defining A Module
Let’s start looking at how we can define a simple module within a simple Rust application. Create a new project using cargo like so:
$ cargo new rust-modules-tutorial
$ cd rust-modules-tutorial
I’ve been picking up Rust with the intention that I’ll be using it to program some games, so for the purpose of this tutorial we’ll be creating a player module within which some of our Player’s functionality will reside.
Within your project, we are going to define a simple module within a new file called player.rs which will live within our src/ directory. This will represent our Player module.
Within this we will define a public function called test_function() which will feature just a very simple println!() call:
pub fn test_function() {
println!("Call to test_function()");
}
Now, with our simple module defined, we can open up our main.rs file within the src/ directory and update it so that it imports our new player module. We can achieve this by adding mod player; to near the top of our file.
We then have the flexibility to access the test_function directly by calling player::test_function(); within our main function, or we can create a local name binding to the test_function with a use declaration like so:
mod player;
use player::test_function;
fn main() {
println!("Hello, world!");
test_function();
}
Awesome, with this in place we can now save this and attempt to run it by calling cargo run:
cargo run
Compiling test-project v0.1.0 (/Users/elliot/Documents/Projects/TutorialEdge/Projects/rust/game/test-project)
Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.22s
Running `target/debug/test-project`
Hello, world!
Call to test_function()
As you can see, this has printed out Hello, World! as well as the Call to test_function() which we defined within our player module.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we looked at the basics of modules within the Rust programming language and how you can build your own incredibly simple modules!
If you have any comments or anything else you would like to discuss, then please let me know in the comments section below!
Further Reading:
If you enjoyed this tutorial, you may also like some of the other tutorials on the site: