Casts are a superset of coercions: every coercion can be explicitly
invoked via a cast. However some conversions require a cast.
While coercions are pervasive and largely harmless, these "true casts"
are rare and potentially dangerous. As such, casts must be explicitly invoked
using the as keyword: expr as Type.
True casts generally revolve around raw pointers and the primitive numeric
types. Even though they're dangerous, these casts are infallible at runtime.
If a cast triggers some subtle corner case no indication will be given that
this occurred. The cast will simply succeed. That said, casts must be valid
at the type level, or else they will be prevented statically. For instance,
7u8 as bool will not compile.
That said, casts aren't unsafe because they generally can't violate memory
safety on their own. For instance, converting an integer to a raw pointer can
very easily lead to terrible things. However the act of creating the pointer
itself is safe, because actually using a raw pointer is already marked as
unsafe.
Here's an exhaustive list of all the true casts. For brevity, we will use *
to denote either a *const or *mut, and integer to denote any integral
primitive:
*T as *U where T, U: Sized*T as *U TODO: explain unsized situation*T as integerinteger as *Tnumber as numberC-like-enum as integerbool as integerchar as integeru8 as char&[T; n] as *const Tfn as *T where T: Sizedfn as integerNote that lengths are not adjusted when casting raw slices -
*const [u16] as *const [u8] creates a slice that only includes
half of the original memory.
Casting is not transitive, that is, even if e as U1 as U2 is a valid
expression, e as U2 is not necessarily so.
For numeric casts, there are quite a few cases to consider: