Chapter 14: Option Types

This chapter introduces Rust’s Option<T> type, a fundamental mechanism for dealing with values that might be absent. C programs often rely on conventions like NULL pointers or special ‘sentinel’ values (e.g., -1, EOF) to signal the absence of a value. Rust, in contrast, encodes this possibility directly into the type system using Option<T>. While this explicit approach requires handling the absence case, it significantly enhances safety and clarity by preventing errors equivalent to null pointer dereferences at compile time.