A tour of dyn Trait

Rust's type-erasing dyn Trait offers a way to treat different implementors of a trait in a homogenous fashion while remaining strictly and statically (i.e. compile-time) typed. For example: if you want a Vec of values which implement your trait, but they might not all be the same base type, you need type erasure so that you can create a Vec<Box<dyn Trait>> or similar.

dyn Trait is also useful in some situations where generics are undesirable, or to type erase unnameable types such as closures into something you need to name (such as a field type, an associated type, or a trait method return type).

There is a lot to know about when and how dyn Trait works or does not, and how this ties together with generics, lifetimes, and Rust's type system more generally. It is therefore not uncommon to get somewhat confused about dyn Trait when learning Rust.

In this section we take a look at what dyn Trait is and is not, the limitations around using it, how it relates to generics and opaque types, and more.