KiranWells

For anyone who is confused: This is exploiting an old soundness bug in the Rust compiler that is still present. The GitHub issue page has this comment from maintainers:

we already had a crate published on crates.io before which used this bug to transmute in safe code, see #25860 (comment).

this issue is a priority to fix for the types team and has been so for years now. there is a reason for why it is not yet fixed. fixing it relies on where-bounds on binders which are blocked on the next-generation trait solver. we are actively working on this and cannot fix the unsoundness before it’s done.

The link they use is working for me; what is the code you are using to fetch the data?

Also, dbg!() is a very useful macro for inspecting state. Might help see what is going on.

That link seems broken (the date is wrong). This worked for me:

https://this-week-in-rust.org/blog/2023/11/08/this-week-in-rust-520/

I haven’t taken it myself, but “The Last Algorithms Course You’ll Need” is free and is written by The Primeagen. He works at Netflix and runs a programming-focused YouTube channel, and as far as I can tell is very knowledgeable and level-headed.

Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists is a great example of how references work (or don’t work) in more complex situations. Might seem like a lot at first, but working through writing the code yourself and seeing the compiler’s responses is a great help when learning Rust. It also doesn’t hurt to read it once and then come back and read it again later, after you try writing some more programs.