I have an application that depends on items of different types having both common methods and special methods for item-specific data. Although not overly pretty, it actually works.

However, the counterpart having common methods and common data became a real mess with unsafe pointers and duplicated code. So my question is simply: is there a reasonable way to do this in Rust?

// Rust does not support inheritance, how to proceed?
struct AContent {
    // Item-specific data supporting both common and specific methods. SOLVED

    // Common data used by common methods. UNRESOLVED
    common_data: bool // Just an example
}

struct BContent {
    // Item-specific data supporting both common and specific methods. SOLVED

    // Common data used by common methods. UNRESOLVED
    common_data: bool // Just an example
}

enum Item {
    A(AContent),
    B(BContent)
}

impl Item {
    fn set_common_data(&self, data: bool) -> Item {
        todo!();
        *self  // for "chaining" purposes
    }
    fn get_common_data(&self) -> bool {
        todo!()
    }
}

fn main() {
    let a = Item::A(AContent{common_data: false});
    let b = Item::B(BContent{common_data: false});
    // Whish:
    a.set_common_data(true).get_common_data();
    b.get_common_data();
}

Note the *self, it is the counterpart to return this in Java and JavaScript.

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