X-Git-Url: https://git.ralfj.de/web.git/blobdiff_plain/c0e17f43f2947869ac855e6b886512de1c772682..9f35bfb604d637a634bc9109eb0626d6e3fe8921:/personal/_posts/2018-07-24-pointers-and-bytes.md?ds=inline diff --git a/personal/_posts/2018-07-24-pointers-and-bytes.md b/personal/_posts/2018-07-24-pointers-and-bytes.md index 8f7089e..0496a5d 100644 --- a/personal/_posts/2018-07-24-pointers-and-bytes.md +++ b/personal/_posts/2018-07-24-pointers-and-bytes.md @@ -121,6 +121,13 @@ This is another example of using a "virtual machine" that's different from the r Here's a simple proposal (in fact, this is the model of pointers used in [CompCert](https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00703441/document) and my [RustBelt work]({% post_url 2017-07-08-rustbelt %}), and it is also how [miri](https://github.com/solson/miri/) implements [pointers](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/fefe81605d6111faa8dbb3635ab2c51d59de740a/src/librustc/mir/interpret/mod.rs#L121-L124)): A pointer is a pair of some kind of ID uniquely identifying the *allocation*, and an *offset* into the allocation. +If we defined this in Rust, we might write +{% highlight rust %} +struct Pointer { + alloc_id: usize, + offset: isize, +} +{% endhighlight %} Adding/subtracting an integer to/from a pointer just acts on the offset, and can thus never leave the allocation. Subtracting a pointer from another is only allowed when both point to the same allocation (matching [C++](https://timsong-cpp.github.io/cppwp/n4140/expr.add#6)).[^2] @@ -166,7 +173,7 @@ We have to say what the value of `v` is, so we have to find some way to answer t (And this is an entirely separate issue from the problem with multiplication that came up in the last section. We just assume some abstract type `Pointer`.) We cannot represent a byte of a pointer as an element of `0..256`. -Essentially, if we use a naive model of memory, the extra "hidden" part of a pointer (the one that makes it more than just an integer) would be lost whne a pointer is stored to memory and loaded again. +Essentially, if we use a naive model of memory, the extra "hidden" part of a pointer (the one that makes it more than just an integer) would be lost when a pointer is stored to memory and loaded again. We have to fix this, so we have to extend our notion of a "byte" to accomodate that extra state. So, a byte is now *either* an element of `0..256` ("raw bits"), *or* the n-th byte of some abstract pointer. If we were to implement our memory model in Rust, this might look as follows: