Circular Buffer Question

[Jonah-Horowitz]

I was wondering if there is a reason that the "circular buffer" exercise seems to be set up to discourage use of generics.

[petertseng]

Good question. Looking at #52 where it was added I don't think there is any specific reason. If I had to guess a reason, it would be that the tests were copied from Go (where generics are unsupported) and/or Ruby (where generics are not really necessary)

I definitely have seen someone submit a solution using generics.

It could be possible to make the tests less discouraging in this regard. What are your ideas on how to do this?

I'd like to investigate a few other problems in this track to see if they would be appropriate for generics too. Seems like a good time to do that now that we are having this conversation.

[Jonah-Horowitz]

I'd say that it would be more encouraging for generics if we simply changed line 11 in the first test to read let mut buffer = CircularBuffer::<char>::new(1); or let mut buffer: CircularBuffer<char> = CircularBuffer::new(1); instead of let mut buffer = CircularBuffer::new(1); as the latter made it far too confusing to create a new method that returned type CircularBuffer<T> and I had to hard-code a return type of CircularBuffer<char> there.
All the other tests work fine without any changes, but we could encourage generics even more by including more tests which store non-char values such as values of type isize and/or String.
I don't recall seeing any other problems in the rust track which seemed to be asking for generics like this one, but I might have forgotten about them.

[petertseng]

For @EduardoBautista and @IanWhitney let's discuss whether generics is something we want. Any reason we would not want it, such as too much for students to think about? I do not think it is too bad, besides circular-buffer is currently the last exercise in the track. The Rust book even has a nice section about generics that we could link to in the comments of the test if we think there will be trouble. It's a good thing to learn at some point.

@Jonah-Horowitz would you like to do the honors of making the change and sending in the PR? I'm sure I could but for various reason I will not be able to do it myself for a few days so it would be a good chance for you.

[IanWhitney]

Generics are part of the custom set exercise as well.

As with other discussions about our problem order, there is probably a good way to order problems to introduce generics.