[burntsushi]

I don't understand what's so confusing about it. GP says

"calling the trait method requires a dynamic lookup to find the method on the boxed object"

It sounds like all you want to say is

"calling the trait method requires a dynamic lookup to find [the vtable instance, which is then used to find] the method on the boxed object"

[naasking]

That's not the clarification I was making. For instance, I simply can't interpret this line from the original post as anything but incorrect:

> then the function pointer will always be in the same place on the object in memory (static dispatch)

As I said, static vs. dynamic dispatch is about knowledge of the vtable instance, not about the offset into the object or the vtable. All of the offsets are always known statically, it's merely what you're indexing into that may or may not be known statically.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I've found that there's a lot of misunderstanding surrounding static vs. dynamic dispatch.

[burntsushi]

I see. Makes sense. It might help to show what the representation in memory of a trait object is. (I'm assuming there's a type for it somewhere in rustc, but I don't know where offhand.)

[steveklabnik]

https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/raw/struct.TraitObject....