Why is Clone required for basically everything?

[jplatte]

I find it surprising that things like impl<A> Debug for Vector<A> require A: Clone. I have looked at the implementation and I'm pretty sure it should be possible to loosen Clone trait bounds in many places. Would PRs for that be welcome?

[bitcoin-eagle]

just read the doc https://docs.rs/im/latest/im/#when-does-cloning-happen . TLDR Clone of small-ish values is faster than alternatives and if you have big values just use Rc<...> or Arc<...> where it clones just the pointer

It cannot be changed without complete redesign. It has optimized like this for a reason that there are small opportunistic arrays that get cloned when needed

[jplatte]

It can be changed. imbl, which is a maintained fork of im, implements some of the required changes (I recently contributed some myself). Note that I am not asking to make Vector<T> a properly usable type that values can be pushed to / that can be cloned or whatever. I just want to be able to drive Debug for a generic type that holds Vector<T> (which I have done successfully, since switching to imbl).