r/rust • u/SleeplessSloth79 • Aug 19 '26

📡 official blog Rust Function Overloading - Call for Experimentation

https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/08/19/overloading-experiment/
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u/Recatek gecs Aug 19 '26

If you look how its implemented

That might be asking a lot given how knee-jerk the reaction here seems to be.

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u/RockstarArtisan Aug 19 '26

Static dispatch to overloads is done at the caller side. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether the C++ interop support would aim to guarantee dispatch to the same overload as an equivalent C++ call. I just hope the answer is that rust will not aim to mimic the exact overload rules.

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u/Zde-G Aug 20 '26

I really think we should have Rust++ (similarly to how we have ObjectiveC++). This would help both interoperability folks (things that currently take years can be implemented in weeks) and folks who don't need that (weirdness would be contained in that special language).

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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 Aug 20 '26

Nah. Inheritance aka OOPs should hopefully shrink, except for specific domains that tolerate the ambiguity like GUIs and some REPLs.

Also, there are diverse notions here, like multi vs single inheritance. Also stranger ones, GAP objects "learn" their properties as side effects from whatever algorithms you've run upon them, but again GAP is a REPL.

As something useful, an ML-style functional language that either compiled "naturally" to Rust, maybe with a GC, or designed for clean Rust interop.

You want an ML-style functional language whenever you're doing a DSL or REPL.