What is a trait object, exactly?

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the trait-object wording and syntax quoted in the issue, then compare them with the RFC 1909 example. Clarify whether the term refers to a value, a type, or syntax, and make the example's trait object unambiguous; the documentation is done when these distinctions are consistent.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

The current wording is pretty confusing and needs refining.

A trait object is an opaque value of another type that implements a set of traits

This suggests a trait object is a value.

For example, given a trait Trait, the following are all trait objects:

  • Trait
  • dyn Trait
  • ...

This suggests "dyn Trait" itself is a trait object.

Syntax TraitObjectType : dyn? TypeParamBounds

This suggests a trait object is a value of type "dyn Trait".

After reading this section, I still don't know which part in

// rfc1909. not exactly sure this is correct.
let reader: dyn Read = File::open(path)?;

is the trait object here. Is it reader, dyn Read, or File?

Dominant language
Rust
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