This allows for edges to be multiple types, and gives us two important
benefits:
(a) Compiler-verified correctness to ensure that we don't generate graphs
that do not adhere to the ontology; and
(b) Runtime verification of types, so that bugs are still memory safe.
There is a lot more information in the documentation within the patch.
This took a lot of iterating to get something that was tolerable. There's
quite a bit of boilerplate here, and maybe that'll be abstracted away better
in the future as the graph grows.
In particular, it was challenging to determine how I wanted to actually go
about narrowing and looking up edges. Initially I had hoped to represent
the subsets as `ObjectKind`s as well so that you could use them anywhere
`ObjectKind` was expected, but that proved to be far too difficult because I
cannot return a reference to a subset of `Object` (the value would be owned
on generation). And while in a language like C maybe I'd pad structures and
cast between them safely, since they _do_ overlap, I can't confidently do
that here since Rust's discriminant and layout are not under my control.
I tried playing around with `std::mem::Discriminant` as well, but
`discriminant` (the function) requires a _value_, meaning I couldn't get the
discriminant of a static `Object` variant without some dummy value; wasn't
worth it over `ObjectRelTy.` We further can't assign values to enum
variants unless they hold no data. Rust a decade from now may be different
and will be interesting to look back on this struggle.
DEV-13597
Mike Gerwitz
8735c2fca3