New

To associate actual code with a type, we use impl blocks:

impl List {
    // TODO, make code happen
}

Now we just need to figure out how to actually write code. In Rust we declare a function like so:

fn foo(arg1: Type1, arg2: Type2) -> ReturnType {
    // body
}

The first thing we want is a way to construct a list. Since we hide the implementation details, we need to provide that as a function. The usual way to do that in Rust is to provide a static method, which is just a normal function inside an impl:

impl List {
    pub fn new() -> Self {
        List { head: Link::Empty }
    }
}

A few notes on this:

• Self is an alias for "that type I wrote at the top next to impl". Great for not repeating yourself!
• We create an instance of a struct in much the same way we declare it, except instead of providing the types of its fields, we initialize them with values.
• We refer to variants of an enum using ::, which is the namespacing operator.
• The last expression of a function is implicitly returned. This makes simple functions a little neater. You can still use return to return early like other C-like languages.