miri VS Clippy

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.

I couldn't find it in the API guidelines either. From what I understand, the idea is that any trait bounds, which includes generic type parameter bounds and lifetime bound on a type (struct or enum) would be repeated back in the impl block

there is a nice discussion on this issue here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy/issues/1689

You should not blindly follow clippy lints. They are sometimes wrong. Another example https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy/issues/9782 .

I often write () = f() to assert that f() is unit. Unfortunately clippy warns on such code ( https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy/issues/9048 ). There are very recent pull requests for this bug, so hopefully this bug will be fixed very soon. But meanwhile I invented this workaround: [()] = [f()] :)

Apart from running clippy on many projects being essential, clippy is also an exceptionally welcoming project, no matter your prior knowledge.

clippy is a great place to get started :) though it isn't exactly new.

clippy is also pretty compiler-adjacent and unlike rust-analyzer uses rustc's internal APIs. Don't let the size of the code base scare you off! It's actually feasible for a newcomer to contribute even such a substantial change as a new lint, and we have issues labeled as "good first issue" that come with mentorship, so you don't need to go it alone.

Yes, you could use it to write a lint. Although you might find it easier to just fork Clippy and add your own lints to their existing framework.

Check out the readme for more information.

They are two of my favorite Rust tools. If you haven’t tried them yet, I highly recommend giving them a try. Clippy can detect various lints in your code and guide you towards writing more idiomatic code. To install Clippy, simply run rustup component add clippy, and to run it within your workspace, execute cargo clippy. For more details, visit Clippy’s GitHub repository.