Well, I would argue that the alternative is to treat the original program (after translation to Rust) as having Undefined Behavior.
There are, to my knowledge, generally two reasons why people might want to transmute a pointer to an integer:
- Chaining many `as` casts is annoying, so calling `mem::transmute` might be shorter.
-- The code doesn't actually care about the *integer* per se, it just needs *some way* to hold arbitrary data in a container of a given time.
+- The code doesn't actually care about the *integer* per se, it just needs *some way* to hold arbitrary data in a container of a given type.
The first kind of code should just use `as` casts, and we should do what we can (via lints, for example) to identify such code and get it to use casts instead.[^compat]
Maybe we can adjust the cast rules to remove the need for chaining, or add some [helper methods](https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/primitive.pointer.html#method.expose_addr) that can be used instead.
I have talked a lot about my vision for "solving" pointer provenance in Rust.
What about other languages?
-As you might have heard, C is moving towards making [PNVI-ae-udi](http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2577.pdf) an official recommendation for how to interpret the C memory model.
+As you might have heard, C is moving towards making [PNVI-ae-udi](http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2676.pdf) an official recommendation for how to interpret the C memory model.
With C having so much more legacy code to care about and many more stakeholders than Rust does, this is an impressive achievement!
How does it compare to all I said above?
projects / web.git / blobdiff