But using ordinary module encapsulation and private fields, you can scope the code that needs to uphold those preconditions to a particular module.

So the "trusted computing base" for the unsafe code can still be scoped and limited, allowing you to reduce the amount of code you need to audit and be particularly careful about for upholding safety guarantees.

Basically, when writing unsafe code, the actual unsafe operations are scoped to only the unsafe blocks, and they have preconditions that you need to scope to a particular module boundary to ensure that there's a limited amount of code that needs to be audited to ensure it upholds all of the safety invariants.

Ralf Jung has written a number of good papers and blog posts on this topic.

   int average(int x, int y) {
       return (x+y)/2;
   }

I might be old, but more than 10 years ago, hardly anyone talked about UB in C and C++ programming. In the last 10 years, it is all the rage, but seems to add very little to the conversation. For example, if you program C or C++ with the Win32 API, there are loads of weird UB-ish things that seem to work fine.

This is not how compilers work. Optimization happens based on language semantics, not on what platforms do.

UB in C is often found where different real hardware architectures had incompatible behavior. Rather than biasing the language for or against different architectures they left it to the compiler to figure out how to optimize for the cases where instruction behavior diverge. This is still true on current architectures e.g. shift overflow behavior which is why shift overflow is UB.

  int average(int x, int y) {
    long sum = (long)x + y;
    if(sum > INT_MAX || sum < INT_MIN)
        return -1; // or any value that indicates an error/overflow
  
    return (int)(sum / 2);
  }

There is no guarantee that sizeof(long) > sizeof(int), in fact the GNU libc documentation states that int and long have the same size on the majority of supported platforms.

https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Range-of-...

> return -1; // or any value that indicates an error/overflow

-1 is a perfectly valid average for various inputs. You could return the larger type to encode an error value that is not a valid output or just output the error and average in two distinct variables.

AI and C seem like a match made in hell.

That used to be the case for 32-bit platforms, but most 64-bit platforms in which GNU libc runs use the LP64 model, which has 32-bit int and 64-bit long. That documentation seems to be a bit outdated.

(One notable 64-bit platform which uses 32-bit for both int and long is Microsoft Windows, but that's not one of the target platforms for GNU libc.)

average(INT_MAX,INTMAX) should return INT_MAX, but it will get that wrong and return -1.

average(0,-2) should not return a special error-code value, but this code will do just that, making -1 an ambiguous output value.

Even its comment is wrong. We can see from the signature of the function that there can be no value that indicates an error, as every possible value of int may be a legitimate output value.

It's possible to implement this function in a portable and standard way though, along the lines of [0].

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/61711253/ (Disclosure: this is my code.)

That won't occur on an 'LP64' platform, [0] but we should aim for proper portability and conformance to the C language standard.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit_computing#64-bit_data_m...

C libraries tend to support a lot of exotic platforms. zlib for example supports Unicos, where int, long int and long long int are all 64 bits large.

- Exposing an unsafe API and relying on the caller to manually uphold invariants

- Doing things like defensive copying at a performance cost

In many cases Rust gives you the best of both worlds: sharing memory liberally while still having the compiler enforce correctness.

And even if you try to provide some kind of safer abstraction, you're limited by the much more primitive type system, that can't distinguish between owned types, unique borrows, and shared borrows, nor can it distinguish thread safety properties.

So you're left to convention and documentation for that kind of information, but nothing checking that you're getting it right, making it easy to make mistakes. And even if you get it right at first, a refactor could change your invariants, and without a type system enforcing them, you never know until someone comes along with a fuzzer and figures out that they can pwn you

In practice (in both languages) you check what the actual unsafe code does (or "all" code in C's case), note code that depends on external actors for safety (it's not all C code, nor is it all unsafe Rust blocks), and check their callers (and callers callers, etc).

From my past experiences with Rust, the team never had to think about data race once, or mutable volatile globals. And we all there suffered from those decades ago with C and sometimes C++ as well.

You like those and don't want to migrate? More power to ya! But badmouthing Rust with what seem fairly uninformed comments is just low. Inform yourself first.

That's only true at the same level of scrutiny as "all C operations can cause undefined behaviour, regardless of what they are", which I find similarly shallow.

And there is not many things we have statistics on in CS, but memory vulnerabilities being absolutely everywhere in unsafe languages, and Rust cleaning up the absolute majority of them even when only the new parts are written in Rust are some of the few we do know, based on actual, real life projects at Google/Microsoft among others.

A memory safe low-level language is as novel as it gets. Rust is absolutely not just hype, it actually delivers and you might want to get on with the times.

    > absolutely laughable c-strings that perform terribly

Rust's type system (including ownership and borrowing, Sync/Send, etc), along with it's privacy features (allowing types to have private fields that can only be accessed by code in the module that defined them) allows you to create fully safe interfaces around code that uses unsafe; there is provably no combination of uses of the interface which lead to undefined behavior.

Now, yeah, it's possible to also use unsafe in Rust just for applying a local optimisation. And that has fewer benefits than a fully encapsulated safe interface, though is still easier to audit for potential UB than C.

So you're right that it's on a continuum, but the distinction between safe and unsafe code means you can more easily find the specific places where UB could occur, and the encapsulation and type system makes it possible to create safe abstractions over unsafe code.

Sure, you can technically just write your own vulnerability for your own program and inject it at an unsafe and see the whole world crumble... but the exact same is true for any form of FFI calls in any language. Is Java memory safe? Yeah, just because I can grab a random pointer and technically break anything I want won't change that.

The fact that a memory vulnerability error may either appear at no place at all OR at the couple hundred lines of code thorough the whole project is a night and day difference.

Unsafe code can be incorrect (or unsound), and needs to be careful about it. Part of being careful is that safe code can call the unsafe code in a way that triggers that unsoundness; in that way, safe code can cause undefined behaviour in unsafe code.

It's not always the case that this is possible; there are unsafe blocks that don't need to depend on safe code for its correctness.