rust-lang / rust-lang/rust-clippy

[lint request] transmute_raw_to_boxed_trait

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A-lint
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Description

People transmute all sort of things into a Box<T: ?Sized> where T is a trait. The layout of this type is unspecified and there is not stable way to do this AFAICT.

@SimonSapin wrote an RFC here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2580

And there is some nightly functionality for it in core::raw::TraitObject (https://doc.rust-lang.org/core/raw/struct.TraitObject.html). We should definitely warn that the behavior of code that does this is unspecified, and maybe tell those on nightly to prefer core::raw::TraitObject instead.

Also, if we ever support multi-trait trait-objects (or different trait-object layouts), this code could break.

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First steps

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Research direction

No repository file or test is named. Start by reading RFC 2580 and the core::raw::TraitObject documentation, then inspect Clippy's existing transmute-related lint patterns. Done means the requested conversion is warned about and the stable versus nightly guidance is settled with tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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