boost VS miri

We do not control boost.org, and putting this on a subdomain imputes an authority for decision-making we don't have. Building it on some temporary domains, then presenting it as a choice is the only approach compatible with Boost values.

Not at all. There is no "they", the Boost Libraries is just a collection of individual libraries that each have their own author or maintainer, usually unpaid (although the C++ Alliance has changed that somewhat). The only funding that "Boost" gets is from running the C++Now conference, and some of that pays for the hosting of boost.org.

Though the links within it seem to be to boost.org and therefore fail to be resolved. Well I can manually replace them with https://www.boostcpp.org/ like:

Oh wow, it behaves incorrectly...when I visit http://boost.org/ or https://... it shows spam on my side, whereas when I visit https://www.boost.org/ it works as expected.

If you wondered why Boost headers look like hell that's because once your library ends up being popular, you're kinda stuck supporting quirky compilers -- either yourself, or accepting patches for it.

Provenance is a dynamic property of pointer values. The actual underlying rules that a program must follow, even when using raw pointers and `unsafe`, are written in terms of provenance. Miri (https://github.com/rust-lang/miri) represents provenance as an actual value stored alongside each pointer's address, so it can check for violations of these rules.

Lifetimes are a static approximation of provenance. They are erased after being validated by the borrow checker, and do not exist in Miri or have any impact on what transformations the optimizer may perform. In other words, the provenance rules allow a superset of what the borrow checker allows.

There has been discussion of doing this with MIRI, which would be easier than all of rustc.

This issue has been fixed: https://github.com/rust-lang/miri/issues/2964

Actually, I've done more advanced tests with MIRI (see https://github.com/rust-lang/miri/issues/2920 for example) which allowed me to fix some issues. I've also made the code compatible with loom, but I didn't found the time yet to write and execute loom tests. That's on the TODO-list, and I need to track it with an issue too.

He is one of the big brains behind Miri, which is a interpreter that runs on the MIR (compiler representation between human code and asm/machine code) and detects undefined behavior. Super useful tool for language safety, pretty interesting on its own.

I would also run your tests in Miri (https://github.com/rust-lang/miri) to try to cover more bases.

You can run miri and it will tell you if the given run triggered any undefined behavior. It will not analyze it for every possible use of the code, but checking for the presence of this specific issue using it should be fairly simple.

If you do encounter a piece of code on which TB performs much worse than SB, do submit it as an issue! There was one recently and we massively improved TB performance on this case by improving garbage collection.