[oconnor663]

> a future version of rustc might deprecate or remove that functionality

Are you sure about this? My understanding is that stable Rust limits itself to compatibility breaks that are both rare and trivially worked around. (Like adding a new inherent method to a standard type that happens to have the same name as your trait method.) Even in a new edition, I think there's a very heavy leaning towards changes that can be automated by `cargo fix`. Removing this idiom seems like it would be much too big of a change. (The obvious automatic fix -- just inserting `pub` as needed -- would presumably make a bunch of currently safe APIs unsound.)