[GTP]

I think this is where things get muddy. On one hand, I think that there is still a function call going on under the hood, even if the syntax hides that. On the other, if you need some preprocessing before assigning the values to your struct's fields, you can still define a special member function that does whatever you need to figure out what the correct values are. In my view, what Rust is actually missing is the default constructor, because it will not initialize variables to some default value for you.

[steveklabnik]

If you define a function that does some preprocessing before creating an instance in Rust, it is not a special member function that the language understands. It’s just a regular old function that happens to return an instance.

I do agree that it can be useful when discussing code to refer to these style functions with a more specific term, like a constructor, but that’s a colloquialism, and when discussing language features, being precise is important.