Sometimes you want it to be lossy, but not most of the time, and yet there is no choice. I had a bug caused by that, that's why I remember it. Silent explicit type conversions are essentially unsafe.
What do you mean by "silent explicit type conversion"? If you said "silent type conversion" I'd read that as "implicit type conversion". But you said "explicit", which means you've got it very clearly in your code that you're doing a type conversion (to a smaller type), so what's silent about that?
In Rust, lossy conversions only occur if you you explicitly write `var as type` and even that syntax is limited to certain types e.g. you can't coerce an integer to a function. In order to do something crazy like that, you'd need to call the unsafe `mem::transmute` function. The language cannot be much safer in this regard short of disallowing any sort of type conversions.
