Anti-patterns & Footguns
Anti-patterns and footguns are Rust habits that compile but undermine Rust’s guarantees, clarity, performance, or error behavior; the cure is usually to move intent into ownership, types, pattern matching, and explicit failure paths.
Concepts
- Ownership
- Borrowing
- Option vs Result
- Result
- Panic Unwinding and Abort
- Concurrency
- Async and Await
- Interior Mutability
- Integer Types
Patterns
- Newtype Pattern
- Message Passing
- Propagating Errors
- Custom Error Types
- Error Handling with thiserror
- Adding Error Context
Antipatterns
- Needless Clone
- Rc RefCell Overuse
- Premature Arc Mutex
- Deref Polymorphism Antipattern
- Stringly-Typed Code
- Integer Overflow Assumptions
- Blocking in Async
- Index Panics vs get
- Unnecessary Collect
- Is Some Then Unwrap
- Sentinel Values
- Unwrap and Expect Overuse
- Panicking in Libraries
- Stringly-Typed Errors
Reading Path
Start with Needless Clone, Index Panics vs get, and Is Some Then Unwrap for local code smells. Then read Stringly-Typed Code, Sentinel Values, and Integer Overflow Assumptions for type-system design habits. Finish with Rc RefCell Overuse, Premature Arc Mutex, Blocking in Async, and Deref Polymorphism Antipattern for architecture-level footguns.
Sources
- The Rust Programming Language, ch. 4 “Understanding Ownership” — the-book, https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-00-understanding-ownership.html
- The Rust Programming Language, ch. 16 “Fearless Concurrency” — the-book, https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch16-00-concurrency.html
- The Rust Programming Language, ch. 17 “Fundamentals of Asynchronous Programming” — the-book, https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch17-00-async-await.html