---

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r: 236038
b: refs/heads/stable
c: af2fd1d
h: refs/heads/master
v: v3

Author: Gankra

[refs]

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branches/stable/FiraSans-Medium.woff

@@ -1,3 +1,254 @@
-# The Unsafe Rust Programming Language (Book)
+% The Unsafe Rust Programming Language
+
+**This document is about advanced functionality and low-level development practices
+in the Rust Programming Language. Most of the things discussed won't matter
+to the average Rust programmer. However if you wish to correctly write unsafe
+code in Rust, this text contains invaluable information.**
+
+This document seeks to complement [The Rust Programming Language Book][trpl] (TRPL).
+Where TRPL introduces the language and teaches the basics, TURPL dives deep into
+the specification of the language, and all the nasty bits necessary to write
+Unsafe Rust. TURPL does not assume you have read TRPL, but does assume you know
+the basics of the language and systems programming. We will not explain the
+stack or heap, we will not explain the syntax.
+
+
+# A Tale Of Two Languages
+
+Rust can be thought of as two different languages: Safe Rust, and Unsafe Rust.
+Any time someone opines the guarantees of Rust, they are almost surely talking about
+Safe Rust. However Safe Rust is not sufficient to write every program. For that,
+we need the Unsafe Rust superset.
+
+Most fundamentally, writing bindings to other languages
+(such as the C exposed by your operating system) is never going to be safe. Rust
+can't control what other languages do to program execution! However Unsafe Rust is
+also necessary to construct fundamental abstractions where the type system is not
+sufficient to automatically prove what you're doing is sound.
+
+Indeed, the Rust standard library is implemented in Rust, and it makes substantial
+use of Unsafe Rust for implementing IO, memory allocation, collections,
+synchronization, and other low-level computational primitives.
+
+Upon hearing this, many wonder why they would not simply just use C or C++ in place of
+Rust (or just use a "real" safe language). If we're going to do unsafe things, why not
+lean on these much more established languages?
+
+The most important difference between C++ and Rust is a matter of defaults:
+Rust is 100% safe by default. Even when you *opt out* of safety in Rust, it is a modular
+action. In deciding to work with unchecked uninitialized memory, this does not
+suddenly make dangling or null pointers a problem. When using unchecked indexing on `x`,
+one does not have to suddenly worry about indexing out of bounds on `y`.
+C and C++, by contrast, have pervasive unsafety baked into the language. Even the
+modern best practices like `unique_ptr` have various safety pitfalls.
+
+It should also be noted that writing Unsafe Rust should be regarded as an exceptional
+action. Unsafe Rust is often the domain of *fundamental libraries*. Anything that needs
+to make FFI bindings or define core abstractions. These fundamental libraries then expose
+a *safe* interface for intermediate libraries and applications to build upon. And these
+safe interfaces make an important promise: if your application segfaults, it's not your
+fault. *They* have a bug.
+
+And really, how is that different from *any* safe language? Python, Ruby, and Java libraries
+can internally do all sorts of nasty things. The languages themselves are no
+different. Safe languages regularly have bugs that cause critical vulnerabilities.
+The fact that Rust is written with a healthy spoonful of Unsafe Rust is no different.
+However it *does* mean that Rust doesn't need to fall back to the pervasive unsafety of
+C to do the nasty things that need to get done.
+
+
+
+
+# What does `unsafe` mean?
+
+Rust tries to model memory safety through the `unsafe` keyword. Interestingly,
+the meaning of `unsafe` largely revolves around what
+its *absence* means. If the `unsafe` keyword is absent from a program, it should
+not be possible to violate memory safety under *any* conditions. The presence
+of `unsafe` means that there are conditions under which this code *could*
+violate memory safety.
+
+To be more concrete, Rust cares about preventing the following things:
+
+* Dereferencing null/dangling pointers
+* Reading uninitialized memory
+* Breaking the pointer aliasing rules (TBD) (llvm rules + noalias on &mut and & w/o UnsafeCell)
+* Invoking Undefined Behaviour (in e.g. compiler intrinsics)
+* Producing invalid primitive values:
+    * dangling/null references
+    * a `bool` that isn't 0 or 1
+    * an undefined `enum` discriminant
+    * a `char` larger than char::MAX
+    * A non-utf8 `str`
+* Unwinding into an FFI function
+* Causing a data race
+
+That's it. That's all the Undefined Behaviour in Rust. Libraries are free to
+declare arbitrary requirements if they could transitively cause memory safety
+issues, but it all boils down to the above actions. Rust is otherwise
+quite permisive with respect to other dubious operations. Rust considers it
+"safe" to:
+
+* Deadlock
+* Leak memory
+* Fail to call destructors
+* Access private fields
+* Overflow integers
+* Delete the production database
+
+However any program that does such a thing is *probably* incorrect. Rust just isn't
+interested in modeling these problems, as they are much harder to prevent in general,
+and it's literally impossible to prevent incorrect programs from getting written.
+
+There are several places `unsafe` can appear in Rust today, which can largely be
+grouped into two categories:
+
+* There are unchecked contracts here. To declare you understand this, I require
+you to write `unsafe` elsewhere:
+    * On functions, `unsafe` is declaring the function to be unsafe to call. Users
+      of the function must check the documentation to determine what this means,
+      and then have to write `unsafe` somewhere to identify that they're aware of
+    the danger.
+    * On trait declarations, `unsafe` is declaring that *implementing* the trait
+      is an unsafe operation, as it has contracts that other unsafe code is free to
+      trust blindly.
+
+* I am declaring that I have, to the best of my knowledge, adhered to the
+unchecked contracts:
+    * On trait implementations, `unsafe` is declaring that the contract of the
+      `unsafe` trait has been upheld.
+    * On blocks, `unsafe` is declaring any unsafety from an unsafe
+      operation within to be handled, and therefore the parent function is safe.
+
+There is also `#[unsafe_no_drop_flag]`, which is a special case that exists for
+historical reasons and is in the process of being phased out. See the section on
+destructors for details.
+
+Some examples of unsafe functions:
+
+* `slice::get_unchecked` will perform unchecked indexing, allowing memory
+  safety to be freely violated.
+* `ptr::offset` in an intrinsic that invokes Undefined Behaviour if it is
+  not "in bounds" as defined by LLVM (see the lifetimes section for details).
+* `mem::transmute` reinterprets some value as having the given type,
+  bypassing type safety in arbitrary ways. (see the conversions section for details)
+* All FFI functions are `unsafe` because they can do arbitrary things.
+  C being an obvious culprit, but generally any language can do something
+  that Rust isn't happy about. (see the FFI section for details)
+
+As of Rust 1.0 there are exactly two unsafe traits:
+
+* `Send` is a marker trait (it has no actual API) that promises implementors
+  are safe to send to another thread.
+* `Sync` is a marker trait that promises that threads can safely share
+  implementors through a shared reference.
+
+All other traits that declare any kind of contract *really* can't be trusted
+to adhere to their contract when memory-safety is at stake. For instance Rust has
+`PartialOrd` and `Ord` to differentiate between types which can "just" be
+compared and those that implement a total ordering. However you can't actually
+trust an implementor of `Ord` to actually provide a total ordering if failing to
+do so causes you to e.g. index out of bounds. But if it just makes your program
+do a stupid thing, then it's "fine" to rely on `Ord`.
+
+The reason this is the case is that `Ord` is safe to implement, and it should be
+impossible for bad *safe* code to violate memory safety. Rust has traditionally
+avoided making traits unsafe because it makes `unsafe` pervasive in the language,
+which is not desirable. The only reason `Send` and `Sync` are unsafe is because
+thread safety is a sort of fundamental thing that a program can't really guard
+against locally (even by-value message passing still requires a notion Send).
+
+
+
+
+# Working with unsafe
+
+Rust generally only gives us the tools to talk about safety in a scoped and
+binary manner. Unfortunately reality is significantly more complicated than that.
+For instance, consider the following toy function:
+
+```rust
+fn do_idx(idx: usize, arr: &[u8]) -> Option<u8> {
+    if idx < arr.len() {
+        unsafe {
+            Some(*arr.get_unchecked(idx))
+        }
+    } else {
+        None
+    }
+}
+```
+
+Clearly, this function is safe. We check that the index is in bounds, and if it
+is, index into the array in an unchecked manner. But even in such a trivial
+function, the scope of the unsafe block is questionable. Consider changing the
+`<` to a `<=`:
+
+```rust
+fn do_idx(idx: usize, arr: &[u8]) -> Option<u8> {
+    if idx <= arr.len() {
+        unsafe {
+            Some(*arr.get_unchecked(idx))
+        }
+    } else {
+        None
+    }
+}
+```
+
+This program is now unsound, an yet *we only modified safe code*. This is the
+fundamental problem of safety: it's non-local. The soundness of our unsafe
+operations necessarily depends on the state established by "safe" operations.
+Although safety *is* modular (we *still* don't need to worry about about
+unrelated safety issues like uninitialized memory), it quickly contaminates the
+surrounding code.
+
+Trickier than that is when we get into actual statefulness. Consider a simple
+implementation of `Vec`:
+
+```rust
+// Note this defintion is insufficient. See the section on lifetimes.
+struct Vec<T> {
+    ptr: *mut T,
+    len: usize,
+    cap: usize,
+}
+
+// Note this implementation does not correctly handle zero-sized types.
+// We currently live in a nice imaginary world of only positive fixed-size
+// types.
+impl<T> Vec<T> {
+    fn push(&mut self, elem: T) {
+        if self.len == self.cap {
+            // not important for this example
+            self.reallocate();
+        }
+        unsafe {
+            ptr::write(self.ptr.offset(len as isize), elem);
+            self.len += 1;
+        }
+    }
+}
+```
+
+This code is simple enough to reasonably audit and verify. Now consider
+adding the following method:
+
+```rust
+    fn make_room(&mut self) {
+        // grow the capacity
+        self.cap += 1;
+    }
+```
+
+This code is safe, but it is also completely unsound. Changing the capacity
+violates the invariants of Vec (that `cap` reflects the allocated space in the
+Vec). This is not something the rest of `Vec` can guard against. It *has* to
+trust the capacity field because there's no way to verify it.
+
+`unsafe` does more than pollute a whole function: it pollutes a whole *module*.
+Generally, the only bullet-proof way to limit the scope of unsafe code is at the
+module boundary with privacy.
+
+[trpl]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
 
-[Start at the intro](http://www.cglab.ca/~abeinges/blah/turpl/intro.html)

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@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+# Summary
+
+* [Data Layout](data.md)
+* [Ownership and Lifetimes](lifetimes.md)
+* [Conversions](conversions.md)
+* [Uninitialized Memory](uninitialized.md)
+* [Ownership-oriented resource management (RAII)](raii.md)
+* [Concurrency](concurrency.md)
+* [Example: Implementing Vec](vec.md)