5a1f2ecdd7
Implement Error for &(impl Error)
Opening this up just to see what it breaks. It's unfortunate that `&(impl Error)` doesn't actually implement `Error`. If this direct approach doesn't work out then I'll try something different, like an `Error::by_ref` method.
**EDIT:** This is a super low-priority experiment so feel free to cancel it for more important crater runs! 🙂
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# Stabilization Report
## Why?
We've been working for the last few years to try "fix" the `Error` trait, which is probably one of the most fundamental in the whole standard library. One of its issues is that we commonly expect you to work with abstract errors through `dyn Trait`, but references and smart pointers over `dyn Trait` don't actually implement the `Error` trait. If you have a `&dyn Error` or a `Box<dyn Error>` you simply can't pass it to a method that wants a `impl Error`.
## What does this do?
This stabilizes the following trait impl:
```rust
impl<'a, T: Error + ?Sized + 'static> Error for &'a T;
```
This means that `&dyn Error` will now satisfy a `impl Error` bound.
It doesn't do anything with `Box<dyn Error>` directly. We discussed how we could do `Box<dyn Error>` in the thread here (and elsewhere in the past), but it seems like we need something like lattice-based specialization or a sprinkling of snowflake compiler magic to make that work. Having said that, with this new impl you _can_ now get a `impl Error` from a `Box<dyn Error>` by dereferencing it.
## What breaks?
A crater run revealed a few crates broke with something like the following:
```rust
// where e: &'short &'long dyn Error
err.source()
```
previously we'd auto-deref that `&'short &'long dyn Error` to return a `Option<&'long dyn Error>` from `source`, but now will call directly on `&'short impl Error`, so will return a `Option<&'short dyn Error>`. The fix is to manually deref:
```rust
// where e: &'short &'long dyn Error
(*err).source()
```
In the recent Libs meeting we considered this acceptable breakage.
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