rust - What are some use cases for tuple structs?

Question

The Rust book mentions that "it is almost always better to use a struct than a tuple struct." Other than the newtype pattern, are there any other advantages of having unnamed fields? Seems to me like the newtype pattern is the only useful case of having tuple structs.

Answer 1

They are very similar to each other.

Given the following definitions

struct TupleStruct(i32, i32);
struct NormalStruct {
    a: i32,
    b: i32,
}

we can construct instances of structs and tuple structs as follows

let ts = TupleStruct(1, 2);
let ns = NormalStruct { a: 1, b: 2 };

// shortcut to initialize the fields of a struct using the values of the
// fields of another struct
let ns2 = NormalStruct { a: 5, ..ns };
let ts2 = TupleStruct { 0: 1, ..ts }; // for TupleStruct it needs curly brackets
                                      // and implicit field names

Assignments work as follows

let TupleStruct(x, y) = ts;
println!("x: {}, y: {}", x, y);

let NormalStruct { a, b } = ns;
println!("a: {}, b: {}", a, b);

A tuple struct's fields have implicit names (0, 1, ...). Hence, accessing fields is performed as follows

println!("Accessing ns by name - {}{}", ns.a, ns.b);
println!("accessing ts by name - {}{}", ts.0, ts.1);

At least for documentation purposes, it's almost always clearer to assign explicit names to the fields of the struct. That's why in the Rust community I've seen many argue for always using a normal struct.

However, there might be cases where the fields of the struct are inherently "anonymous", one notable case being the "newtype" (tuple struct with one field) where you're only wrapping an inner type.

In that case, naming the inner field does not arguably provide any additional information.

struct Inches {
    inner: i32,
}

vs

struct Inches(i32);

The section on structs on the Rust book has more info on newtypes.