Associated types in Rust allow you to define traits with a type placeholder that implementors of the trait can specify. This enables more flexible and type-safe abstractions.
For example, instead of passing types as generic parameters every time, you can use associated types to simplify the interface. Associated types are particularly useful when working with collections, iterators, or data processing pipelines.
In this challenge, you'll define a trait with an associated type and implement it for a struct. The goal is to create a structure for managing a simple Key-Value store where keys and values can have different types specified by the trait implementation.
You can solve the problem using either generics or associated types, but the challenge is made to make you familiar with associated types, so try to solve the challenge by using them intead of generics.
Define a trait KeyValueStore with an associated type Key and Value. Implement this trait for the struct InMemoryStore. The implementation should allow storing and retrieving key-value pairs of the specified types.
Define a trait KeyValueStore with:
Key.Value.set to add a key-value pair.get takes a reference of &Key and returns Option<&Value>.Create a struct InMemoryStore that uses a HashMap to store key-value pairs. Implement the KeyValueStore trait for this struct.
Make sure all relevant values are public so that they can be accessed from outside the module (essential to pass the tests).
If you're stuck, here are some hints to help you solve the challenge:
Define associated types in the KeyValueStore trait like this:
pub trait KeyValueStore {
type Key;
type Value;
fn set(&mut self, key: Self::Key, value: Self::Value);
fn get(&self, key: &Self::Key) -> Option<&Self::Value>;
}