[MaulingMonkey]

> if somewhere in the plumbing you connect the wrong source to the wrong destination, you get no warning.

A valid concern. I've been in the position of having to fix those bugs.

I'm not going to recommend `qsort` over `std::sort` or anything like that. I've seen `void*` "user data" pointers in C APIs and decided to stuff runtime checkable handle values in there instead of real pointers to blobs. In Rust, this can mean avoiding some unnecessary `unsafe { ... }` blocks, since while reading anything from a `*const c_void` requires such things, reading from a global `Mutex<HashMap<*const c_void, Arc<dyn Any>>>` or similar nonsense does not. I'll eat the performance hit unless I'm worrying about an actual hot path!

And I'm not going to stand in the way of newtype wrappers around void pointers either. I'll +1 the PRs with `class ASpecificKindOfBlob { void* data; size_t length; };` and suchlike as well, if `std::span`s aren't your type of thing, and abide by measures to centralize such plumbing in one place such that the opportunities to make a mistake are fewer.

But sometimes a blob is just a blob, and breaking out `std::byte` is putting lipstick on a pig. And it's not even the right color lipstick.