Introduction

This book covers the design patterns for context-generic programming (CGP), a new programming paradigm for Rust that allows strongly-typed components to be implemented and composed in a modular, generic, and type-safe way.

What is Context-Generic Programming

A high level overview of CGP is available on the project website. This section contains a summarized version of the overview.

At its core, CGP makes use of Rust's trait system to build generic component interfaces that decouple code that consumes an interface from code that implements an interface. Through this decoupling, code can be written to be generic over any context, and then be wired to be used on a concrete context by writing few lines of code. CGP makes use of Rust's strong type system to help ensure that any such wiring is type-safe, catching any unsatisfied dependencies as compile-time errors.

CGP shares some similarities with other modular programming patterns, such as OCaml modules, Scala implicits, mixins, and dependency injection. Compared to these other patterns, CGP has a unique advantage that it enables high modularity while also being type-safe and concise. With Rust as its host language, CGP also allows high-performance and low-level code to be written in a modular way, without requiring complex runtime support.

CGP is designed to solve a wide range of common problems in programming, including error handling, logging, encoding, and modular dispatch. In particular, it allows writing static-typed Rust programs to be almost as expressive as writing dynamic-typed programs, but with the additional type safety guarantees. If you ever feel that Rust's type system is restricting your ability to reuse code, or be forced to duplicate code through copy-pasting or macros, then CGP may be of help to solve your problem.

That said, programming in CGP is as expressive, but not as easy, as dynamic-typed programming. There may be a steep learning curve in learning how to program in a generic way, and this book aims to help make that learning process more approachable. Thoughout this book, we will slowly understand how CGP works, and learn about useful design patterns that can be used in any programming situation.

Work In Progress

This book is currently a work in progress. A majority of the chapter is yet to be written. Please come back later to check out a completed version of this book.

Scope of This Book

This book is written in the style of a reference material for readers with all levels of expertise. As a result, it may not be as easy to understand for beginners who need a little more introduction to more basic programming techniques in Rust.

A separate book will be written in the future, to provide beginner-friendly tutorials for learning context-generic programming.

For brievity, this book also does not cover motivation or concrete examples of why you should learn and use context-generic programming. We will cover that in blog posts, and a separate book that covers real world use of CGP.

Chapter Outlines

The first section of this book, Terminology, will introduce common terms to be used to understand CGP. We will learn about what is a context, and what are consumer and provider traits.

In the next section, Core Concepts, we will cover the core concepts and the Rust-specific design patterns that we use to enable context-generic programming.

Following that, Design Patterns will introduce general design patterns that are built on top of the foundation of context-generic programming.

The section Domain-Specific Patterns will cover use-case-specific design patterns, such as error handling and logging.

Finally, the secion Related Concepts will compare context-generic programming with related concepts, such as the similarity and differences of context-generic programming as compared to object-oriented programming.

Contribution

This book is open sourced under the MIT license on GitHub.

Anyone is welcome to contribute by submitting pull requests for grammatical correction, content improvement, or adding new design patterns.

A GitHub Discussions forum is available for readers to ask questions or have discussions for topics covered in this book.