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On 2017-09-12 03:53 AM, steve donovan wrote:
On Sat, Sep 9, 2017 at 6:41 PM, Soni L. <fakedme@gmail.com> wrote:Rust has compile-time traits. But it does not, in fact, have runtime traits. If you make a trait and impl that trait on someone else's struct, reflection with that struct will not be able to see your trait, and thus won't be able to make trait objects with it.Since we're nailing down concepts here, I submit that such traits are indeed dynamic. I have someone else's Foo struct, and implement Trait for Foo. Box<Trait> is a trait object and has a vtable, so I can call any Trait methods on it. But true, there's a key difference. If I receive a trait object, I can't magically upcast that into the 'real' underlying type Foo, since that information is thrown away (this gets called 'type erasure'). Is this perhaps what you meant?
That's not dynamic: The whole process happens at compile time.For example, dynamic typing means typing is done at runtime. Dynamic traits means traits are done at runtime. This isn't the case with Rust.
In fact you can't even dynamically (using reflection/code that's not aware of the traits/types) "DOWNcast" Foo into Trait! If you're not aware of Trait (if you don't explicitly check for Trait), then the compiler won't emit *any* code for Trait!
You also can't add and remove traits at *runtime*. Among other things.In Cratera, even the TraitType (the one in obj:[TraitType].f()) doesn't exist at compile-time. At compile-time, it's only a variable/name, and it could come from anywhere, even a function argument!
(Perhaps you're thinking of a different meaning of "dynamic"? Because "dynamic" in scripting languages always meant done entirely at runtime.)
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