Yeah, `as` is pretty much "do what C casts do except without UB" (which is basically "do what Java casts do") but/and people are justifiably uncomfortable with it. It’s very likely to go away (be deprecated) at some point as soon as someone comes up with something explicit-but-ergonomic-enough to supersede it. I’d like to see checked, overflowing, wrapping, and saturating alternatives for narrowing coercions, just like there are for arithmetic operations. Float-to-int coercions have the additional and orthogonal checked/truncating/rounding/floor/ceil axis which complicates things.