[eyelidlessness]

It’s not even safe if you’re 100% sure the types are compatible, unless you’re also 100% sure nothing will change that fact. The reason it’s unsafe is because it suppresses the type error permanently, even if whatever factors led to your certainty now change anywhere upstream ever.

There are certainly ways to guard against that, but most of them involve some amount of accepting that the type checker produces errors for a reason.

[mpeg]

Yes of course the types could change in the future, and the forced cast might cause issues. I wish there was a better way, but this is an acceptable tradeoff.

Bear in mind, most changes that could cause issues will still be caught by the type checker in whatever object you're casting to. Obviously it should not be overused where not needed, but it's almost always used in fluent apis because there's no better way (that I know of, at least)

[matt_kantor]

> it's almost always used in fluent apis because there's no better way (that I know of, at least)

Got an example?