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RFC for pre-1.0 prelude additions #1030

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56 changes: 56 additions & 0 deletions text/0000-prelude-additions.md
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- Feature Name: NA
- Start Date: 2015-04-03
- RFC PR: (leave this empty)
- Rust Issue: (leave this empty)

# Summary

Add `Default`, `IntoIterator` and `ToOwned` trait to the prelude.

# Motivation

Each trait has a distinct motivation:

* For `Default`, the ergonomics have vastly improved now that you can
write `MyType::default()` (thanks to UFCS). Thanks to this
improvement, it now makes more sense to promote widespread use of
the trait.

* For `IntoIterator`, promoting to the prelude will make it feasible
to deprecate the inherent `into_iter` methods and directly-exported
iterator types, in favor of the trait (which is currently redundant).

* For `ToOwned`, promoting to the prelude would add a uniform,
idiomatic way to acquire an owned copy of data (including going from
`str` to `String`, for which `Clone` does not work).

# Detailed design

* Add `Default`, `IntoIterator` and `ToOwned` trait to the prelude.

* Deprecate inherent `into_iter` methods.
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We may want to consider removing these methods entirely actually as it's difficult to call a trait method instead of an inherent method sometimes.

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Good point, otherwise it would be quite painful to avoid the deprecation warnings.

That makes this even more of a "technically breaking" change, but again I suspect no code will actually break. Maybe a good trial for @brson's tool!


* Ultimately deprecate module-level `IntoIter` types (e.g. in `vec`);
this may want to wait until you can write `Vec<T>::IntoIter` rather
than `<Vec<T> as IntoIterator>::IntoIter`.

# Drawbacks

The main downside is that prelude entries eat up some amount of
namespace (particularly, method namespace). However, these are all
important, core traits in `std`, meaning that the method names are
already quite unlikely to be used.

Strictly speaking, a prelude addition is a breaking change, but as
above, this is highly unlikely to cause actual breakage. In any case,
it can be landed prior to 1.0.

# Alternatives

None.

# Unresolved questions

The exact timeline of deprecation for `IntoIter` types.

Are there other traits or types that should be promoted before 1.0?