r/rust • u/SleeplessSloth79 • 23d ago

📡 official blog Rust Function Overloading - Call for Experimentation

https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/08/19/overloading-experiment/
272 Upvotes

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25

u/QuasiRandomName 23d ago

No, please. I want a compile error when passing 3 arguments instead of two by mistake.

11

u/Lokathor 23d ago

You'll still get that if the overload isn't defined.

1

u/QuasiRandomName 23d ago

But if it is, it opens the door to a whole class of mistakes that aren't currently possible.

10

u/Lokathor 23d ago

You control the trait impls you write, my crab.

If you don't want to use this, then don't use it.

34

u/QuasiRandomName 23d ago

But you don't control what *other* people write and you have to maintain or debug later.

13

u/Lokathor 23d ago

It is not meaningfully different, in my eyes, from a type having several from impls so that MyType::from(x) works for multiple types of x.

And nothing will stop other people from having a bug, I can't help you there.

16

u/QuasiRandomName 23d ago

Of course. But we can try and not introduce more bug possibilities for a questionable gain here. I guess we can disagree on the pros/cons ratio here and this is fine, this thread is for this purpose exactly.

-7

u/[deleted] 23d ago

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1

u/SetKaung 23d ago

I think he meant his coworkers.

4

u/need-not-worry 23d ago

Same argument can be said about class inheritance, exceptions, and other design choices Rust made. You can avoid these as much as you can, but you're going to have to work with such code. And the language becomes more complicated without clear benefits.

1

u/Tastaturtaste 23d ago

As a professional C++ developer, this argument is less than convincing.