Type system abuse

[chop0]

Hello,

The way the library uses the type system for absolutely everything makes refactoring lambdas like run_client into full methods extremely difficult. It also makes compilation slow, and produces C++-like compiler errors.

Are there any plans to clean this up, perhaps by merging some of the interfaces or by using dyn/vtables? What's the reason it's designed like this? Interface-merging would make the library less flexible, and dynamic dispatch might make it marginally slower, but it'd improve the usability of the library significantly.

I understand changing this would be an enormous undertaking - I'm just curious about why it's like this in the first place.

[domenukk]

It's pretty hard to do this better, due to the very flexible nature of LibAFL.
If you one one dyn trait object somewhere, it would need to have all possible functions defined on that trait.
If you think of Mutator for example, a mutator is vastly different if it works on a bytes input vs. a grammar input. A unified Mutator trait would probably restrict us somewhere down the road.

That being said, we all know the amount of Generics is painful. I just don't know of a good alternative. PRs welcome :P