I’m not an experienced Rust developer by any means, but to me, it seems one of the key points in writing good software is “do not do the things the compiler manual tells you not to do”. The fact that it works for you now does not provide me with much confidence that it will work for everyone, or in all cases, especially after I’ve asked anyone knowledgeable about this.
In the best case, by doing this, you lose nearly all the memory safety benefits of Rust, and instead introduce really hard to think about cross-language move semantics. I cannot begin to think how this will work with concurrency.
You seem to think that the only sort of undefined behavior this will lead to is a crash in case of struct incompatibility, but violating the assumptions the compiler and optimizer are making is, IMHO, a recipe for disaster. I don’t think you can predict in what ways optimized code will break in cases where you are doing something that it assumes you will never do.
Nearly un-debuggable rare segfaults and security issues are the least of it. Silent data corruption is another fun one. Especially in codepaths that you are not testing (errors, malicious input), this will be a problem. The recent bug report of error: numeric field did not have utf-8 text: �ps�� when getting cksum for �
may be a good candidate already.
Since this layer constitutes the basic building blocks of the Rust code, I’m really afraid that we’re introducing a source of bugs that will haunt us for years to come.