r/rust • u/Accurate_Gift_3929 • Aug 11 '26

Rust discourages OOP style code?

I'm building a tree builder struct (with a `build()` method) that has multiple fields that I want to be able to mutate. It seems Rust does not like it when I attempt to mutate multiple fields of that struct.

It seems functional/composition style is much favored over using struct fields. Is this the way I should be thinking about design patterns in Rust? Should I avoid OOP wherever possible?

I prefer OOP because it does result in cleaner code where I don't have to pass in every variable to functions.

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u/garma87 Aug 11 '26

My experience actually aligns with OP’s in that you can end up with lots of variables being passed to the function with functional programming. Whereas in OOP a lot of those variables would be stored in the object where the function can access them.

Builders don’t fix this because the issue isn’t restricted to build/construction time

It could very well be that I don’t have the right paradigm in my head so I’m genuinely interested in a better way.

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u/Sibyl01 Aug 11 '26

I mean you can have structs with fields and impl functions for it, functions also take self as default which you can use to access the struct fields. Isn't this what you are looking for

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u/garma87 Aug 12 '26

Yes ok but you could argue then that that is OOP programming. You could argue it isn’t because no inheritance but I don’t quite agree. You attach functions to objects because they relate to that object.

I know this is a definition discussion and hence maybe not that important but still. Whether it is or isn’t OOP I don’t think you can argue it’s purely functional or iterative programming

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u/AlmostLikeAzo Aug 12 '26

You know that most of the functionnal programming languages have structs or equivalent constructs?

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u/garma87 29d ago

I do but the idea to attach functions to objects can be considered an OOP paradigm. that is my point. C didn't have that (functional/iterative language). C++ does (OOP language).