Collective bikeshed of `#[marker] trait Foo { .. }`

[Tom-Phinney]

I do want to throw out the additional paint color of #[impls_may_overlap] since I think there’s some precedent for using may like this.

#[impls_may_overlap] is very appropriate, since in English “may” historically has been used to convey permission.

[Centril]

As for which overlap-using name, I have no strong opinions, but I do want to throw out the additional paint color of #[impls_may_overlap] since I think there’s some precedent for using may like this.

#[impls_may_overlap] is very appropriate, since in English “ may ” historically has been used to convey permission.

Rust itself also provides precedent for may in the form of #[must_use] in the sense that both may and must are modal verbs.

Do we think that impls_ is necessary or could we leave that inferred and shorten the name to #[may_overlap] perhaps? Here, the name in #[may_overlap] is 11 characters long and shorter than in #[overlappable] which is 12 characters long.

[Ixrec]

I have a very slight preference for including impl(s) because

• this is a pretty small feature in the grand scheme of things and not likely to be written dozens of times in a row, so a long descriptive name wins by default

• I feel like a user who’s brand new to all this trait system machinery would have a much easier time guessing what “impls may overlap” means on a trait than what “overlappable” means on a trait (there’s probably some plausible but wrong meaning you could invent for “overlapping traits”; just look at how many people thought “inherent trait impls” were a thing because of bare trait syntax)

[gbutler]

and this attribute was about, say, making a public API commitment to never make the trait non-trivial so that client crates could also write overlapping impls, then this would be more persuasive

I am thinking that that is exactly what this attribute represents. “I as the API author recognize the trivialness of this Trait and am making a commitment to keep it Trivial so you as a client are free to create 3rd party implementations of this trait”.

[gbutler]

I do want to throw out the additional paint color of #[impls_may_overlap]

I like this one a lot. If we’re not comfortable with “trivial” or “simple”, I like this one the best of anything suggested so far. Could possibly be shorted to just “may_overlap” as well.

[dcarosone]

I too like #[impls_may_overlap] best so far

The shorter #[may_overlap] sounds a little like it might be referring to memory overlapping somehow, which is of course nonsense for a trait, let alone an empty trait. This potential confusion is (small) cognitive load.

Longer still, but perhaps:

• #[other_crates_may_impl]
• #[any_crate_may_impl]

Or shorter by a couple of chars:

• #[anyone_may_impl]

[gbutler]

Or shorter by a couple of chars:

• #[anyone_may_impl]

This sounds REALLY good. I’d shorten even a bit more to:

• #[any_may_impl]

[scottmcm]

I’m not a huge fan of trivial because the meaning of an unsafe trait can be quite complex and nuanced, even if it has no overridable behaviour.

I have a very slight preference for including impl(s) because

• this is a pretty small feature in the grand scheme of things and not likely to be written dozens of times in a row, so a long descriptive name wins by default

I think this is particularly true since it goes on the trait, of which there’s only one, not on the impls, of which there are many.

[Soni]

third_party_impls?

[felix.s]

#[mere_proposition]

(Mostly joking.)

[withoutboats]

I think marker is a fine name, since we already call these marker traits.

I think if a trait has items that can’t be overridden, that trait is still a marker trait, because you can’t define any items in impls. I am also dubious that we would ever add this feature, since it adds complexity & irregularity and is semantically equivalent to just writing free functions.

I’m more interested in the possibility that there are other things we could do with marker traits (nothing in particular comes to mind), and I think limiting the name of this attribute to the particular behavioral change we’re introducing today would be shortsighted.

[gbutler]

since we already call these marker traits.

Yes, but, what about traits that aren’t “Marker” traits (i.e. have some default, non-overridable methods) that this should work with as well? I think that was the OP’s point that “Marker” is misleading because it will (potentially) need to be used with non-marker traits; hence, the commentary around “simple/trivial” traits and a hierarchy of “Trait Complexity Kinds”.

[withoutboats]

Yes, but, what about traits that aren’t “Marker” traits (i.e. have some default, non-overridable methods) that this should work with as well?

I specifically addressed this in my comment:

I think if a trait has items that can’t be overridden, that trait is still a marker trait, because you can’t define any items in impls. I am also dubious that we would ever add this feature, since it adds complexity & irregularity and is semantically equivalent to just writing free functions.

[gbutler]

I specifically addressed this in my comment:

Derp! i need to get more sleep!

[Centril]

[it] is semantically equivalent to just writing free functions.

(You are are aware of this, but to paint a fuller picture…)

There are two main differences which does make it semantically nonequivalent:

1. a free function can’t be called with method syntax; but a trait function can be;

   This can be dealt with by letting free functions reference self.

2. there’s no ad-hoc overloading, which is one of the main points of traits (per Wadler’s “How to make ad-hoc polymorphism less ad-hoc”).

[Nemo157]

a free function can’t be called with method syntax; but a trait function can be

This can be worked around by having an item-less marker trait + a pre-implemented extension trait (until that pattern gets more sugar such as you suggest).

there’s no ad-hoc overloading, which is one of the main points of traits (per Wadler’s “How to make ad-hoc polymorphism less ad-hoc”).

Doesn’t overloading make multiple implementation of a marker trait incoherent again?

[Centril]

This can be worked around by having an item-less marker trait + a pre-implemented extension trait (until that pattern gets more sugar such as you suggest).

Sure, that’s what folks generally do today, but some consider it a hack.

Doesn’t overloading make multiple implementation of a marker trait incoherent again?

As far as I know, No it doesn’t; because all items are restricted to have the default provided definition; of course you can say that this is not overloading at all in that case…

[withoutboats]

As far as I know, No it doesn’t; because all items are restricted to have the default provided definition; of course you can say that this is not overloading at all in that case…

We’re diverging from the topic, but of course that’s not overloading: ad hoc overloading means the ability to redefine the item according the particular type.

My point is that I think every item of a trait should be ad hoc overloadable for consistency and simplicity and comprehensibility of our system, at the expense of letting you wrote non-overloadable functions with method or associated function syntax. I’m similarly against free functions with self arguments.

That is, I think it is not worth allowing full syntactic freedom to create exactly the API syntax you might want at the expense of providing language features such that the syntax loses its connection to particular semantics. In this case, I think it is beneficial to users to be able to work from an understanding associated items are type dispatched in an ad hoc overloadable way. (My concerns about macro methods are along the same line.)

[Centril]

We’re diverging from the topic

returning to the topic…

While it is true that “we already call these marker traits”, I pointed out here (and @Ixrec extended it to #[trivial] et al. here) that having the name #[marker] would result in some marker traits having the annotation #[marker] while some marker traits would not. It is then unclear what a marker trait is… is it a trait with zero items (the current common definition), or is it a trait which has a #[marker] annotation on it?

The main benefit of #[marker] is as you say if we would extend the meaning of the attribute to do more things; but you also said nothing comes to mind (whereas things come to mind wrt. extending the attribute to other sorts of traits even if you are currently opposed to such extensions…).

I think that @Ixrec also hit the nail on the head when they said:

all the alternative names like marker/empty/trivial/simple/basic all fail to convey to the reader what is actually being enabled by the attribute

and

the concept of “overlapping” impls is something you already need to understand for the orphan rule and specialization and so on.

It seems to me that a naming which somehow includes “overlap” takes less out of the complexity budget than other names.

[scottmcm]

that having the name #[marker] would result in some marker traits having the annotation #[marker] while some marker traits would not

Well, there’s a good T-libs question: would we be willing (eventually, probably not immediately) to put #[marker] on everything in std::marker?