Rust and functional programming

You don’t need to go “all-in” on functional programming to enjoy these features in Rust. The language smoothly combines functional ideas with its imperative and systems-level features, making them useful tools for your development.

This multi-paradigm nature allows you to, for instance, use a concise iterator chain (a functional style) to process data before applying a mutable state update within a loop (an imperative style), giving you the best of both worlds.

In this chapter, we’ll focus on some of the most impactful functional features Rust offers:

• Iterators: For processing sequences of data lazily and efficiently
• Closures: For creating flexible, anonymous functions that can capture their environment
• Higher-order functions: How functions that take other functions as arguments, such as iterator methods, enable expressive code

Let’s see how these can make your Rust code shine...