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Some people sometimes complain about Rust being a very "complex" language, usually in the context of a new feature being added as if it were the straw that breaks the camel's back. I'd like to flip the argument around: What existing Rust feature would you *remove*?

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specialization. it encourages people to write way more complicated generic unsafe code which is really bad and seems to be a big source of bugs in std

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how is it that generic code creates the need for unsafe?

9:45 PM · May 19, 2022Twitter Web App

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one of the main usecases of specialization is to do optimizations like "oh this iterator can be trusted to report its size and so we can pre-reserve a buffer and do no capacity/bounds checks"

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If we had stable specialization, I think the actual main usecase would be containers and algorithms - something like this vector addition has a generic implementation but if we know it's an f32 we can call into this hand-optimized version. </dreams>

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