alt Hacker NewsBecause in order to have standard library breaking changes across editions, if those types are exposed in the crate public types, or change their semantics across editions, the compiler has to be able to translate between them when generating code.
See the Rust documentation on what editions are allowed to change, and the advanced migration guide on examples regarding manual code migration.
Not so much what has happened thus far, rather the limitations imposed in what is possible to actually break across editions.
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What you're describing sounds more like a potential issue with editions if/when they allow breaking stdlib changes more than a problem with editions as they exist today, which is more what I took the original comment to be talking about.
Or put another way, a hypothetical feature that you made up in your head is the thing that requires source access. Editions do not let you change the semantics of types.
To be fair, Rust tooling does tend toward build-from-source. But this is for completely different reasons than the edition system: if you had a way to build a crate and then feed the binary into builds by future compilers, it would require zero additional work to link it into a crate using a different edition.