[tasn]

This is something I thought about a lot before switching to Rust at Svix[0]. What I came to realize though, that there are no "casts to any and move on", but rather there are silencing real bugs and praying you won't hit them.

Almost every time I've ever tried to silence the type checker (in any other language) it resulted in a bug.

Does it make you slower? Definitely at times, but it's mostly OK, and the code is pretty damn clean. You can check out our repo to see how it looks[1].

Edit: we don't use Actix, we use Axum, but the same holds for Actix too.

[0] https://www.svix.com

[1] https://github.com/svix/svix-webhooks

[shepmaster]

+1 for Axum. I recently moved [1] the Rust Playground's backend to Axum and have been very happy with it and the team producing it.

[1]: https://github.com/integer32llc/rust-playground/pull/777

[Thaxll]

> Almost every time I've ever tried to silence the type checker (in any other language) it resulted in a bug.

What does it even mean? You can't silence a type checker.

[HideousKojima]

You can in JS/TS and Python. Technically you could even do it in a language with a fairly strong type system like C# or Java by casting to object or dynamic, though the code using the cast object after that will probably be very unidiomatic.

[Thaxll]

Can't you cast to any in Rust as well?

[sondr3]

To expand on the others, unlike in TS/JS, Python etc you can cast to the `Any`-trait but cannot use it as if it is any value, you need to convert it to the type you want and then handle the errors. A function that accepts `&str` will never accept a `Any` value, unlike in TS where you can override the type checker using `as`. Worth noting that TypeScript's type system is unsound [0] too.

[0]: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type-compatibil...

[fzzzy]

No. Rust does not have the equivalent of Object or void *.

[vladvasiliu]

There's the Any trait [0]. Not sure if this is exactly like void* in C, but this doesn't look particularly ergonomic to use.

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/any/index.html

[tasn]

Exactly what the sibling comment said, you can do it in many languages. Also, the comment I replied to suggested just that ("cast to any"), which is the context. :)