Okay this is really funny because I was messing about with generics relating to the Write trait just yesterday, leading to much frustration.

> you find yourself propagating a generic bound up an entire hierarchy of data structures and functions using those structures

And I did exactly that. I did eventually get around to using dyn Write, but that still gave me headaches because of how I cannot use impl Write as a result type in closures, which I need to do if I want to use tracing_subscriber::fmt::with_writer() and pass in these trait objects.

Despite being this close to the solution, I somehow again wound up propagating generics back at least four functions.

I ended up not writing any generic-based stuff and resigned to just manually writing each type's implementation out, but I am going to tinker with this again today. Hopefully, I can use your advice.

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. Means a lot!

> there was something satisfying about C in the old DOS days, where you could make a pointer to video memory and scribble on it

Exactly.

The first thing the compiler tells after using dyn is, that the value is not object safe. Then you just got yourself another problem ;) With a lot of experience it becomes more obvious from the start what approach can work out, but with little knowledge, the compiler only sends you in circles and the great error messages tell you what you need to change to make the code compile, but usually pushes you in the direction you tried to avoid. I'm reasonably productive now, but it was bloody hard time to get there.

I never worked with low level languages except some university lession, but I think I have good general understanding how a CPU and memory works (just for some context)