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authorJonas Schievink <jonasschievink@gmail.com>2021-01-24 22:09:45 +0100
committerGitHub <noreply@github.com>2021-01-24 22:09:45 +0100
commit5a1f2ecdd7847bae36608651429ef1698890a69f (patch)
tree21ad06054dc77b501ab11e0a20c84d4523348255 /compiler/rustc_llvm/llvm-wrapper/RustWrapper.cpp
parent9a9477fada5baf69d693e717d6df902e411a73d6 (diff)
parentbbf5001b9428bbf5b4ac93f42dc7017b27c9002f (diff)
downloadrust-5a1f2ecdd7847bae36608651429ef1698890a69f.tar.gz
rust-5a1f2ecdd7847bae36608651429ef1698890a69f.zip
Rollup merge of #75180 - KodrAus:feat/error-by-ref, r=m-ou-se
Implement Error for &(impl Error)

Opening this up just to see what it breaks. It's unfortunate that `&(impl Error)` doesn't actually implement `Error`. If this direct approach doesn't work out then I'll try something different, like an `Error::by_ref` method.

**EDIT:** This is a super low-priority experiment so feel free to cancel it for more important crater runs! 🙂

-----

# Stabilization Report

## Why?

We've been working for the last few years to try "fix" the `Error` trait, which is probably one of the most fundamental in the whole standard library. One of its issues is that we commonly expect you to work with abstract errors through `dyn Trait`, but references and smart pointers over `dyn Trait` don't actually implement the `Error` trait. If you have a `&dyn Error` or a `Box<dyn Error>` you simply can't pass it to a method that wants a `impl Error`.

## What does this do?

This stabilizes the following trait impl:

```rust
impl<'a, T: Error + ?Sized + 'static> Error for &'a T;
```

This means that `&dyn Error` will now satisfy a `impl Error` bound.

It doesn't do anything with `Box<dyn Error>` directly. We discussed how we could do `Box<dyn Error>` in the thread here (and elsewhere in the past), but it seems like we need something like lattice-based specialization or a sprinkling of snowflake compiler magic to make that work. Having said that, with this new impl you _can_ now get a `impl Error` from a `Box<dyn Error>`  by dereferencing it.

## What breaks?

A crater run revealed a few crates broke with something like the following:

```rust
// where e: &'short &'long dyn Error
err.source()
```

previously we'd auto-deref that `&'short &'long dyn Error` to return a `Option<&'long dyn Error>` from `source`, but now will call directly on `&'short impl Error`, so will return a `Option<&'short dyn Error>`. The fix is to manually deref:

```rust
// where e: &'short &'long dyn Error
(*err).source()
```

In the recent Libs meeting we considered this acceptable breakage.
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