A deep dive into implementing the 'tagless initial' pattern in Rust using enums and the never type to achieve zero-cost abstractions, demonstrated with optimized assembly output.
My only explanation of this slop (which curiously actually makes some sense and probably even worked at some point, before #[rustc_unsafe_specialization_marker] was booted from #![feature(rustc_attrs)]?) is that a human came up with a llm query like “hey benevolent AI overlord, can I have tagless final in zero-cost Rust please?”, the llm dutifully played with possible approaches, came up with this tagless initial approach, the meat proxy did not bother to explain the results properly even to themself and published this as “zero-cost tagless final in Rust”.
If my (completely unfounded) hypothesis is true, then what you see is actually just heavy slop that obscures the essence more than it conveys it.
My only explanation of this slop (which curiously actually makes some sense and probably even worked at some point, before
#[rustc_unsafe_specialization_marker]was booted from#![feature(rustc_attrs)]?) is that a human came up with a llm query like “hey benevolent AI overlord, can I have tagless final in zero-cost Rust please?”, the llm dutifully played with possible approaches, came up with this tagless initial approach, the meat proxy did not bother to explain the results properly even to themself and published this as “zero-cost tagless final in Rust”.If my (completely unfounded) hypothesis is true, then what you see is actually just heavy slop that obscures the essence more than it conveys it.
score 2 · canonical