turbofish

English

Etymology

turbo- +‎ fish; coined by Anna Harren in 2015, originally in jest, later adopted by official documentation.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈtɝboʊˌfɪʃ/

Noun

turbofish (plural turbofishes)

1. (programming) A syntactic element in Rust, ::<>, with arguments between < and >, that specifies the generic arguments of a function in an expression.
   • 2017 November 21, Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff, Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development, "O'Reilly Media, Inc.", →ISBN:

     For static method calls, you can supply the type parameter explicitly using the turbofish ::<> notation:

   • 2019 January 31, Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta, Mastering Rust, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 122:

     The turbofish operator in generic functions appears right after the function name and before the parenthesis.

   • 2021 June 30, Herbert Wolverson, Hands-on Rust, Pragmatic Bookshelf, →ISBN:

     You can add a turbofish to a function call with the syntax function::<Type>(). For example, collect::<Vec<MyType>>().

Further reading

• “Paths in expressions”, in The Rust Reference‎^[1], 2019