2024-09-04 submission: "Why Rust needs scoped generics"

[ais523]

A submission for the "Observations/Thoughts" section of This Week In Rust.

[mariannegoldin]

TY! Approved

[madsmtm]

Don't know where to discuss this, so thought I'd write quickly here:

Very insightful post! The problem of passing values to types reminds me of contexts and capabilities that was discussed a few years ago - I suspect that "just" contexts and capabilities + generativity would be able to solve the problems that you outlined to begin with, though I am unsure, in any case your proposal is certainly more powerful!

[ais523]

Very insightful post! The problem of passing values to types reminds me of contexts and capabilities that was discussed a few years ago - I suspect that "just" contexts and capabilities + generativity would be able to solve the problems that you outlined to begin with, though I am unsure, in any case your proposal is certainly more powerful!

Thanks for the feedback! (And thanks especially for the link – it's sent me down a rabbit hole of prior art on this subject.) I agree that this is effectively a cross between automatic context passing and generativity – but it's interesting that many of the comments on the automatic context passing proposals thought that it would need some sort of link to the type system to be useful.