Josh Black

Rust for JavaScript Developers: Ownership

Learn about ownership from the lenses of JavaScript

9 min read

Getting into Rust from JavaScript can be challenging at times. One of the harder concepts you encounter early on when writing Rust is the idea of ownership.

Coming from a JavaScript background, it can be challenging to translate certain patterns or concepts that are prevalent from this ecosystem into Rust.

For example, let's make a Counter class:

class Counter {
  constructor() {
    this.count = 0;
  }
 
  increment() {
    this.count += 1;
  }
 
  decrement() {
    this.count -= 1;
  }
}

In JavaScript, we know that we can make new instances of this class by calling new Counter() and that this instance will have the methods increment and decrement to update the internal count property. What would this look like in Rust, and how does ownership come into play?

Building a struct in Rust

Whenever you think of writing a class in JavaScript, you will likely want a struct in Rust. A struct is similar to objects that you would find in JavaScript, with one big difference being that they must be explicitly typed.

For example, in JavaScript we can create an object by writing the following:

const counter = { count: 0 };

In Rust, we would have something that looks more like:

struct Counter {
  // Note: i32 is the type for the count field in the Counter struct.
  // It represents signed (postive and negative) integers in Rust
  count: i32,
}
 
fn main() {
  let counter = Counter { count: 0 };
}

These forms are roughly equivalent, but there is a big difference in terms of how you can interact with count in either language.

Immutable vs mutable

In JavaScript, you can mutate count directly in the object, or the Counter class we made above.

const counter = { count: 0 };
 
counter.count = 2;

If we tried to do something similar in Rust, however, we would run into the following problem:

fn main() {
  let counter = Counter { count: 0 };
  // error[E0594]: cannot assign to `counter.count`, as `counter` is
  //               not declared as mutable
  counter.count = 1;
}

Here, we see that Rust considers the value of counter to be immutable and so it cannot be changed unless it's declared as mutable.

Surprisingly, if you're coming from the JavaScript side you might have expected this to be the way const worked. However, in JavaScript what const provides is an immutable reference to a value, not that the value itself is immutable.

This means that while we can't reassign the const variable, its value can still potentially change.

const count = 1;
// TypeError: Assignment to constant variable.
count = 2;
 
const counter = { count: 0 };
// Totally works
counter.count = 1;

In Rust, values are immutable by default. This means that we can't change any of counter's properties, unless we define the value as mutable. Thankfully, we can update our source code to use let mut to define our counter as mutable:

fn main() {
  let mut counter = Counter { count: 0 };
  counter.count = 1;
}

Adding in some instance methods

We've played around with making a struct, basing it on objects in JavaScript, but what about the Counter class? How do we get there?

In JavaScript, we create new instances of a class using the new operator, meaning that new Counter() gives us another instance of a counter. This will then call the constructor for the Counter class before returning the class instance.

We can do something similar in Rust by using the impl block for the Counter type:

impl Counter {
  fn new() -> Self {
    Self { count: 0 }
  }
}
 
fn main() {
  let mut counter = Counter::new();
  counter.count = 1;
}

Here, we add an associated function to the impl block for the Counter type. From a JavaScript perspective, this is similar to a static method on a class. We can call it using Counter::new() and it will give us back a Counter struct like we saw before, very similar to a constructor in JavaScript.

Note: the associated function specifies that it returns Self over in: fn new() -> Self. Here, Self refers to the type that the impl is for, in this case Counter

If we wanted to add in our instance methods increment and decrement, we would do something similar but this time we include the self argument. Inside of our impl block, if a function takes in self then we can call it using a method-call syntax, like counter.increment().

struct Counter {
  count: i32,
}
 
impl Counter {
  fn new() -> Self {
    Self { count: 0 }
  }
 
  fn increment(self) {
    self.count += 1;
  }
}
 
fn main() {
  let mut counter = Counter::new();
  counter.increment();
}

However, we run into a problem here. When running the program, we would see this error for increment:

impl Counter {
  fn new() -> Self {
    Self { count: 0 }
  }
 
  // error[E0594]: cannot assign to `self.count`, as `self` is not
  //               declared as mutable
  fn increment(self) {
    self.count += 1;
  }
}

Turns out, we ran into the same problem that we had with let counter. Here, self is immutable and we can't change it's value. We can turn this to a mutable reference by using &mut self:

impl Counter {
  fn new() -> Self {
    Self { count: 0 }
  }
 
  // ✅
  fn increment(&mut self) {
    self.count += 1;
  }
 
  fn decrement(&mut self) {
    self.count -= 1;
  }
}
 
fn main() {
  let mut counter = Counter::new();
  counter.increment();
}

Bringing ownership into the picture

So, what's going on here? Why is this even related to ownership in the first place if we can change the type signatures and everything works?

One of the most interesting parts about this program when learning about ownership in Rust is when we change let mut counter to let counter.

If you're trying to translate this from a JavaScript background, it would totally make sense that one would think this would work. We don't want the counter to change, but each of the instance methods can totally change the internal structure.

When we run the program with this change, we get the following message:

fn main() {
  let counter = Counter::new();
  // error[E0596]: cannot borrow `counter` as mutable, as it is not
  //               declared as mutable
  counter.increment();
}

Wait, what? What is this borrow and why is it coming up now?

As it turns out, all of the functions and values that we are working with will have to follow Rust's rules of ownership. When we call increment, counter is moved to the increment method.

We could illustrate this clearly if we changed increment back to when it took in self:

impl Counter {
  fn new() -> Self {
    Self { count: 0 }
  }
 
  fn increment(self) {
    println!("{}", self.count);
  }
}
 
fn main() {
  let counter = Counter::new();
  counter.increment();
 
  // error[E0382]: borrow of moved value: `counter`
  println("{:?}", counter);
}

When the counter value is moved to the increment method, our main function no longer has ownership over them. This falls in line with Rust's rules of ownership:

  • Each value in Rust has a variable that’s called its owner.
  • There can only be one owner at a time.

In our main function, counter is the owner of the value from Counter::new(). The owner of counter is then moved to the increment method and then dropped from the scope.

As a result, when we use println! to try and print the value we get an error. In this case, we are trying to borrow a value that has already moved.

Rewinding to the solution

So we had a solution above that seemed to work, and then we talked about some problems that came up with ownership by changing the solution. How could we rewind from where we are to understand why each piece of our implementation not only works but why it works in terms of ownership?

First up, let's try and change the type of the self argument in increment. When it is specified as self, we know that its immutable and that it takes ownership of self. If we don't want to take ownership of a value, and instead want to borrow it, we can use the mutable reference type (&mut) that we saw in the solution.

Here, we use a mutable reference to borrow an owned value (in this case, our counter):

impl Counter {
  fn new() -> Self {
    Self { count: 0 }
  }
 
  fn increment(&mut self) {
    self.count += 1;
  }
}
 
fn main() {
  let counter = Counter::new();
  counter.increment();
 
  // error[E0382]: borrow of moved value: `counter`
  println("{:?}", counter);
}

When we run this code we get an error similar to the one we got before:

fn main() {
  let counter = Counter::new();
  // error[E0596]: cannot borrow `counter` as mutable, as it is
  //                not declared as mutable
  counter.increment();
 
  println("{:?}", counter);
}

Now, we know that increment is trying to borrow counter and we can update the type from let to let mut:

fn main() {
  let mut counter = Counter::new();
  counter.increment();
 
  println("{:?}", counter);
}

Wrapping up

Ownership in Rust can be tricky sometimes, but using it is well worth the trade-off. Here, we touched on some parts of Rust and JavaScript like immutability and ownership.

In the end, we hopefully came to a spot where we feel confident in translating some of the concepts that we might find in a JavaScript codebase over to a Rust codebase.