tail VS unsafe-code-guidelines

I'm working on a side-quest, and I just started using unit tests (hurray!): https://github.com/LeCyberDucky/tail/blob/main/src/main.rs

Since the program takes over the terminal when running, my trusty old debugging method of adding print statements everywhere doesn't work all too well here. Therefore, I took on the side quest of creating my own version of the UNIX tool "tail" this weekend. I'll write my debugging statements to a file instead and then use this tool to monitor that file. There are ways to achieve this without writing my own tool, but I wasn't completely satisfied with the stuff I tried (I'm on Windows), so I thought it would be fun and hopefully be too big a detour to implement it myself.

I've been using those today in this small project: https://github.com/LeCyberDucky/tail/blob/main/src/main.rs

Useful context on the Rust side is this issue [1]. It sounds like some of the author's concerns are addressed already.

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/unsafe-code-guidelines/issues/4...

Is this captured by one of the known soundness conflicts? If not then should consider adding it to the list.

There are some competing proposals for different memory models. Stacked borrows is the current proposal, but there are more work in the approproate WG.

Thank you /u/RalfJung for bringing formal methods to Rust, both through models like Stacked Borrows, by developing miri, and by working on unsafe-code-guidelines which aims to specify exactly what is and isn't allowed in unsafe code (surprisingly, it's an open question as 2023!)

You could imagine some way to make this safe for example automatically convert &'short &'long mut T to &'short &'short T, but it's non-trivial to prove they are safe at all, not to mention ensuring this is correctly implemented in the compiler. If you're interested there's also a discussion on whether the opposite (& & T to & &mut T) is sound here.

Agreed! MIRI is so good, it still feels like magic to me. It also comforts me that the Rust team takes improving unsafe semantics seriously, with the past Unsafe Code Guidelines WG and today's operational semantics team (t-opsem).

I think there are some aspects of this rule that are still undecided. See for example:

- https://github.com/rust-lang/unsafe-code-guidelines/issues/8...

- https://github.com/rust-lang/miri/issues/2732

C is much better specified than unsafe Rust. Some things are just not worked out yet in Rust. This may sometimes even bite very experienced devs, such as this issue with Box's aliasing semantics, which tripped up the author of left-right.