Re: [PATCH v6 3/9] rust: sync: atomic: Add ordering annotation types

Boqun Feng
2025-07-10T15:57:14Z

On Thu, Jul 10, 2025 at 05:05:25PM +0200, Benno Lossin wrote:
> On Thu Jul 10, 2025 at 4:42 PM CEST, Boqun Feng wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 10, 2025 at 02:00:59PM +0200, Andreas Hindborg wrote:
> >> "Benno Lossin" <lossin@kernel.org> writes:
> >> > On Thu Jul 10, 2025 at 8:00 AM CEST, Boqun Feng wrote:
> >> >> +/// The trait bound for annotating operations that support any ordering.
> >> >> +pub trait Any: internal::Sealed {
> >> >
> >> > I don't like the name `Any`, how about `AnyOrdering`? Otherwise we
> >> > should require people to write `ordering::Any` because otherwise it's
> >> > pretty confusing.
> >>
> >> I agree with this observation.
> >>
> >
> > I'm OK to do the change, but let me show my arguments ;-)
> >
> > * First, we are using a language that supports namespaces,
> > so I feel it's a bit unnecessary to use a different name just because
> > it conflicts with `core::any::Any`. Doing so kinda undermines the
> > namespace concepts. And we may have other `Any`s in the future, are we
> > sure at the moment we should keyword `Any`?
>
> I don't think `Any` is a good name for something this specific anyways.

Well, that's the point of namespace: providing contexts for a name, and
the contexts can be very specific. I'm sure we both have used "any" in
English to refer something specific ;-)

> If it were something private, then sure use `Any`, but since this is
> public, I don't think `Any` is a good name.
>

This essentially means we keyword `Any` as a public trait name, then we
should document it somewhere, along with other names we want to keyword.

Regards,
Boqun

> > * Another thing is that this trait won't be used very often outside
> > definition of functions that having ordering variants, currently the
> > only users are all inside atomic/generic.rs.
>
> I don't think this is a good argument to keep a bad name.
>
> > I probably choose the `ordering::Any` approach if you guys insist.
>
> I don't think we have a lint for that, so I'd prefer if we avoid that...
>
> Someone is going to just `use ...::ordering::Any` and then have a
> function `fn<T: Any>(_: T)` in their code and that will be very
> confusing.
>
> ---
> Cheers,
> Benno