As a interesting side note:

The "as" operator is often considered to have been a mistake. Both because of unchecked casts and because of "doing to much".

So I wouldn't be surprised if in the (very) long term there will be a rust edition deprecating `as` casts (after we have alternatives to all cast done with `as`, which are: Pointer casts, dyn casts/explicit coercion and truncating integer casts, for some we already have alternatives for on stable for other not).

And for all who want to not have `as` today you can combine extension traits (which internally still use `as`) + clippy lint against any usage of `as`.

EDIT: I forgot widening integer casts in the list above ;-).