coherence versus generic traits in rust

There was a question in #rust-beginners a while back where someone was confused about how anyone could write an impl for From when an impl<T> From<T> for T already existed. For the most part, if you impl something for T , then coherence rules generally enforce that no other specific impls can exist, since they’d overlap with the generalized impl. (At least, until specialization shakes itself out.)

Initially, I’d thought that it was the preliminary specialization work that had allowed people to write their own From<SomeType> for OtherType impls. My mental rule is just what I’d written above: An impl for T precludes any other specific impl. It turns out, though, that specialization has no part in this; this rule’s been there the entire time, so it had to have worked before specialization was a thing!

The proper way to think about it is that From<T> isn’t really one trait. It’s a sort of trait category, since T could really be anything. So impl<T> From<T> for T isn’t as broad as it seems. The situations covered by this line only account for things like impl From<Thing> for Thing , which has a trivial and obvious implementation: Just pass the Thing through.

So if you write a discrete From<SomeType> for OtherType impl, it won’t clash with the generic impl above, and everything works out. And since this is how the “one error enum to rule them all” pattern works, it’s rather nice that this is available.

(This impl can still get in the way, though. If you want to write a generic impl<From, To> From<From> for To , regardless of what constraints you put on, it will clash with the above impl, since - in Rust 1.14, at least - you can’t specify that From != To . Until you can add that constraint in, impls of this kind are off-limits, sadly.)

discuss on /r/rust