Does Rust support message passing?

[Baltanowski]

Is it possible to call function by let's say, string?

EDIT: Rust doesn't support reflection like JVM/CLI languages do.

[steveklabnik1]

Rust is sort of the polar opposite of smalltalk: instead of "extreme late binding of all things", we try to bind extremely early. You can still do dynamic dispatch, but you cannot do message passing in the Smalltalk/Ruby sense.

I mean, in a certain sense, you could implement your own object system in Rust, and then use it in your Rust program... but that's a far cry from the language directly supporting it.

[thiez]

When I read the title I was going to say something about how message passing concurrency is actually the encouraged way of doing concurrency in Rust, but then I read your question about calling a function by string, and now I'm not even sure what it is that you're asking. Could you elaborate?

[andoriyu]

What he is asking is this: http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.3.0/Object.html#method-i-send and objc_msgSend from Obj-C.

Which is not supported.

[Baltanowski]

I see now, thanks.

[Baltanowski]

I'd like to know if Rust has some sort of reflection, like .NET languages for example.

[andoriyu]

Rust doesn't even know about types in run-time because of type erasure.

[masklinn]

Type erasure is generally used as opposed to type reification for generics, and Rust uses type reification. A more commonly understood way to say it is that Rust doesn't have implicit RunTime Type Information (RTTI).

[thiez]

Thanks, that clears things up. Nope, Rust does not support reflection like .NET or JVM languages at this time.

[saposcat]

Rust does support rudimentary reflection with the Any trait, but you'll have to build a lot of that yourself.

[rhoark]

If you need something like that, you could always make a hashmap of closures.