papers update: add ICFP talk; add refinement paper

[web.git] / personal / _posts / 2016-01-09-the-scope-of-unsafe.md

diff --git a/personal/_posts/2016-01-09-the-scope-of-unsafe.md b/personal/_posts/2016-01-09-the-scope-of-unsafe.md
index 403d6b3eab6c6e0f7e477e3a1998666d721334ad..757bd738ca155ea2402454551dd0bec225e04eed 100644 (file)
--- a/personal/_posts/2016-01-09-the-scope-of-unsafe.md
+++ b/personal/_posts/2016-01-09-the-scope-of-unsafe.md
@@ -14,6 +14,8 @@ What I am saying is that the scope of `unsafe` is larger than the `unsafe` block
 It turns out that the underlying reason for this observation is also a nice illustration for the concept of *semantic types* that comes up in my [work on formalizing Rust]({{ site.baseurl }}{% post_url 2015-10-12-formalizing-rust %}) (or rather, its type system).
 Finally, this discussion will once again lead us to realize that we rely on our type systems to provide much more than just type safety.
 
+**Update (Jan 11th):** Clarified the role of privacy; argued why `evil` is the problem.
+
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 ## An Example
@@ -60,6 +62,12 @@ More precisely speaking, `ptr` points to an array of type `T` and size `cap`, of
 The function `evil` above violates this invariant, while all the functions actually provided by `Vec` (including the ones that are implemented unsafely) preserve the invariant.
 That's why `evil` is the bad guy. (The name kind of gave it away, didn't it?)
 
+Some will disagree here and say: "Wait, but there is some `unsafe` code in `Vec`, and without that `unsafe` code `evil` would be all right, so isn't the problem actually that `unsafe` code?"
+This observation is correct, however I don't think this position is useful in practice.
+`Vec` with `evil` clearly is a faulty data structure, and to fix the bug, we would remove `evil`.
+We would never even think about changing the `unsafe` code such that `evil` would be okay, that would defeat the entire purpose of `Vec`.
+In that sense, it is `evil` which is the problem, and not the `unsafe` code.
+
 This may seem obvious in hindsight (and it is also [discussed in the Rustonomicon](https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/nomicon/working-with-unsafe.html)), but I think it is actually fairly subtle.
 There used to be claims on the interwebs that "if a Rust program crashes, the bug must be in some `unsafe` block". (And there probably still are.)
 Even academic researchers working on Rust got this wrong, arguing that in order to detect bugs in data structures like `Vec` it suffices to check functions involving unsafe code.