Rust passes a method the value it’s being called on as its first argument, which must have the special name self. Since self’s type is obviously the one named at the top of the impl block, or a reference to that, Rust lets you omit the type, and write self, &self or &mut self as shorthand for self: Queue, self: &Queue or self: &mut Queue. You can use the longhand forms if you like, but almost all Rust code uses the shorthand, as shown before.

In our example, the push and pop methods refer to the Queue’s fields as self.older and self.younger. Unlike C++ and Java, where the members of the “this” object are directly visible in method bodies as unqualified identifiers, a Rust method must explicitly use self to refer to the value it was called on, similar to the way Python methods use self, and the way JavaScript methods use this.

Since push and pop need to modify the Queue, they both take &mut self. However, when you call a method, you don’t need to borrow the mutable reference yourself; the ordinary method call syntax takes care of that implicitly. So with these definitions in place, you can use Queue like this:

let mut q = Queue { older: Vec::new(), younger: Vec::new() };

q.push('0');
q.push('1');
assert_eq!(q.pop(), Some('0'));

q.push('∞');
assert_eq!(q.pop(), Some('1'));
assert_eq!(q.pop(), Some('∞'));
assert_eq!(q.pop(), None);

impl Queue {
    pub fn is_empty(&self) -> bool {
        self.older.is_empty() && self.younger.is_empty()
    }
}

assert!(q.is_empty());
q.push('☉');
assert!(!q.is_empty());

impl Queue {
    pub fn split(self) -> (Vec<char>, Vec<char>) {
        (self.older, self.younger)
    }
}

let mut q = Queue { older: Vec::new(), younger: Vec::new() };

q.push('P');
q.push('D');
assert_eq!(q.pop(), Some('P'));
q.push('X');

let (older, younger) = q.split();
// q is now uninitialized.
assert_eq!(older, vec!['D']);
assert_eq!(younger, vec!['X']);