One reason for that is that it's easy to get rid of it, and guess what, we have a bunch of compiler flags just for that.

That absolutely does not mean that "UB is bad, period".

In fact you praise Rust but only safe Rust has no UB.

Actually, if they do end up putting more and more knowledge about the type system invariants in the optimizer, the rules for UB in unsafe code are going to be more complicated than C (think type-based aliasing on steroids).

Don't get me wrong, it's good design to nicely package these in unsafe code, but if your language can craft pointers and load/store from them, your spec will have to have UB (or boundcheck all loads and stores).

This is one of the biggest issues I have with Rust, personally. The interaction between safe and unsafe Rust is not well defined, making it largely impossible to write 'correct' unsafe Rust that isn't broken in some weird situation, or won't ever get broken in later versions of the compiler. And since the Rust compiler has even more information then the C compiler does, it can theoretically make much crazier optimizations then it is doing right now that could break your code down the line. Like you mentioned, if it goes down that route it'll be like the strict-aliasing situation in C but times 10.

Not contesting the claim, but what in the interaction specifically is not well defined?

Or from a more pragmatic point of view, if one could compile un-safe Rust similarly to "optimisations off" in C compilers. No aggressive optimisation, only straight forward translation. While Rust code marked safe could be compiled with the most insane optimisations, and still be ... safe.

If not, I think people concerned about such things, might opt to write the unsafe parts on C (a known quantity) and the safe parts in Rust.

For the curious, the performance uses of unsafe in encoding_rs are roughly in these categories:

- Omitting Unicode correctness checks (i.e. asserting that output is correct without having the standard library re-check; Unicode correctness is part of the core competence of the crate).

- Viewing buffers of u8 or u16 as buffers of usize.

- Viewing buffers of u8 or u16 as SIMD register-sized units.

- Omitting bound checks where the compiler fails to elide them and it matters for performance, especially where the performance difference matters for competitiveness with C++.

- Reinterpreting SIMD registers in a different lane configuration. (Exposes endianness but otherwise actually safe.)

- Calling intrinsics that don't really have anything unsafe about them except that Rust makes intrinsics categorically unsafe instead of deciding on a case by case basis if they need to be unsafe.

Of these, viewing buffers as buffers of ALU or SIMD register-sized units are the only cases that come near strict aliasing and could be trouble if the compiler felt eligible to reorder writes of (in the C sense) incompatible types relative to each other on the assumption that buffers of different types are disjoint.

All this stuff is why we’re working so hard on formalizing unsafe! Your parent is right that it’s a bit fuzzy right now, but in the future, we hope that it’ll be way nicer than other unsafe languages. There’s some tooling ideas...

I don't see why it's so bad. I've never really seen a legitimate use for signed overflow, and if it happens, the code is likely buggy anyway.

"I don't know how to properly check overflows so I'm just going to look and see if the number has wrapped" isn't really a good excuse, even if a few people fall for that trap. If anything, I'd rather see a simple, standard way for checking arithmetic introduced.

That's way beyond "can't do X"; it's "the meaning of your program suddenly ceases to exist".

I don't think that's a particularly useful point, as is.

I have no idea whether any equivalent exists for Rust.

One can also forbid the use of any `unsafe` blocks for a crate/module (with the #[forbid(unsafe_code)] attribute), but this is slightly different to the {-# LANGUAGE Safe #-} pragma in that it does consider imports at all. However, since "unsafety" is modeled in the language in Rust, and is granular, people are encouraged to have every module be "Trustworthy" (in Safe Haskell terms): if an individual function could cause undefined behaviour if misused, it should be marked "unsafe", and a "Safe" module (i.e. one using the forbid above) won't be able to use it.

So the attitude of "only unsafe programs have UB by the Rust spec" effectively means "all programs have UB by the Rust spec"

If they want wrapping overflow, fine. If they don't, great.

What if I know overflow can't happen (e.g. I have an integer counting from 1 to 10)? How do I say "it doesn't matter how you handle overflow; just do whatever is fastest"?

* overflow is a “program error”, not UB

* compilers must either check for overflow and panic, or two’s compliment wrap

* when debug_assertions are on, implementations are required to panic on overflow

This means release mode wraps today, but if it’s cheap enough someday, we could make it panic.

If you want specific semantics on overflow, then you should use the various wrappers and/or methods that let you do them directly, rather than relying on any of the above. But you don’t have to specify; by default, the above is the semantics.

In the future we’ll have const generics that let you express it directly without that shenanigans.

  type jump_by_tenth is delta 0.1 range 1.0 .. 99.0;

ETA: I'm not completely correct. Ada could have used something akin to 2-complement overflow handling, that is forcing every operation on a range to have a result in the same range, but it introduces runtime overhead too.