Some pieces of the Rust object system: extension, overriding, and self

Abstract

The Rust programming language combines an expressive static type system with a lightweight, structural, prototype-based object system. This combination situates it at an unusual point in the language design space, since almost all prototype-based object systems are found in dynamically typed languages such as Self and JavaScript. Implementing a prototype-based object system in a language that tries to statically guarantee type safety poses an interesting challenge, since dynamic object extension and method overriding cause the type of the current object to change at run-time. In my talk, I’ll discuss how I implemented self-dispatch, object extension, and method overriding in the Rust compiler, and explain how these features interact with each other in ways that I didn’t anticipate when I started the project.