Oddity with lifetime elision and type aliases

[traviscross]

In reviewing a test case for,

• Add a new mismatched-lifetime-syntaxes lint #138677
  • (Which is part of Split elided_lifetime_in_paths into finer-grained lints #120808.)

I was led to the following oddity:

pub struct W<'a>(&'a ());
pub type Alias<'a> = W<'a>;

impl<'a> Alias<'a> {
    fn f1<'x>(self: &W<'a>, x: &'x ()) -> &() { x } //~ `'_ == 'x`, what?
    fn f2<'x>(self: &Alias<'a>, x: &'x ()) -> &() { x } //~ `'_ == 'x`, what?
    fn f3<'x>(&self, _: &'x ()) -> &() { self.0 } //~ OK.
}

impl<'a> W<'a> {
    fn f4<'x>(self: &W<'a>, _: &'x ()) -> &() { self.0 } //~ OK.
    fn f5<'x>(self: &Alias<'a>, x: &'x ()) -> &() { x } //~ `'_ == 'x`, what?
    fn f6<'x>(&self, _: &'x ()) -> &() { self.0 } //~ OK.
}

Playground link

This was noticed long ago in #60944 (comment), which is presumably when the test case was added, but I can't immediately find later discussion.

The Reference doesn't document this behavior. (The FLS, as best I can tell on a skim, does not document lifetime elision at all.)

If there's a good reason for this as the correct behavior, we should probably write this down in the Reference. Otherwise, I'm going to propose we agree to try to do away with this somehow, if possible, maybe over an edition.

@rustbot labels +C-discussion +T-lang +I-lang-nominated +A-lifetimes

cc @rust-lang/lang @ehuss

[Veykril]

(The FLS, as best I can tell on a skim, does not document lifetime elision at all.)

It does, but it also does not capture this oddity I think: https://github.com/rust-lang/fls/blob/main/src/types-and-traits.rst#lifetime-elision

[traviscross]

Interestingly, rust-analyzer, when configured to show inlay lifetime hints, gets f1-f3 and f5-f6 correct (i.e. matches the behavior of rustc) but gets f4 wrong.

That is, it annotates it like this:

impl<'a> Alias<'a> {
    fn f1<'x>(self: &W<'a>, x: &'x ()) -> &'x () { x } //~ `'_ == 'x`, what?
    fn f2<'x>(self: &Alias<'a>, x: &'x ()) -> &'x () { x } //~ `'_ == 'x`, what?
    fn f3<'0, 'x>(&self, _: &'x ()) -> &'0 () { self.0 } //~ OK.
}

impl<'a> W<'a> {
    fn f4<'x>(self: &W<'a>, _: &'x ()) -> &'x () { self.0 } //~ Wrong r-a annotation.
    fn f5<'x>(self: &Alias<'a>, x: &'x ()) -> &'x () { x } //~ `'_ == 'x`, what?
    fn f6<'0, 'x>(&self, _: &'x ()) -> &'0 () { self.0 } //~ OK.
}

[Veykril]

Those inlay hints are entirely syntactically based and known to be wrong in some scenarios (r-a has not implemented semantic lifetime elision yet)

[joshtriplett]

We discussed this in today's @rust-lang/lang meeting. This seems emphatically like a bug. We should try to fix it, and do a crater run to see if fixing it breaks anything.