This page of Rust's Book shows how to implement exactly the State pattern without inheritance, and it feels pretty natural. Rust's traits do have inheritance but that isn't used here - at first there is one trait, State, but by the time we're writing idiomatic Rust there are no traits at all.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch17-03-oo-design-patterns.ht...

We end up with three types of post, Post, DraftPost and PendingReviewPost, and our state pattern is implemented by the type transitions implemented in these three types. When you call Post::new() you get a DraftPost, and the only way to get a Post from that is to request the review, obtaining a PendingReviewPost and have somebody accept it to get the Post from there.