alt Hacker News> A trait must follow so-called object safety rules to be used as a trait object
This seems for me to be a major design flaw of Rust. It tries to repurpose traits for dynamic polymorphism, even if this doesn't fit perfectly. C++ is more honest, it has two separate mechanisms for static polymorphism (templates) and dynamic polymorphism (inheritance).
In the contrary it’s one of the best design decisions of the language. The rules for object safety are the same C++ applies to virtual functions. On the other hand you don’t have to choose a priori whether you’ll need dynamic or static polymorphism, you can choose at use site, and the size of the objects do not pay for dynamic dispatch because the vtable pointer is kept together with the object pointer, not within the object.