slotmap VS unsafe-code-guidelines

It looks like .get_disjoint_mut() from slotmap failed under stacked borrows, but seems to pass under tree borrows

I think slotmap is meant to solve this exact issue. Basically when you insert into a collection you get an Id:Version tuple as key. When you reuse a slot, next time the key will be Id:Version+1 and when you try to access the removed value by using Id:Version, it will return None. You can think about it as delayed invalidation.

Dunno about existing implementations, but it looks like it's a feature they'd accept: https://github.com/orlp/slotmap/issues/73

It's actually quite easy.

You can use either slot map or slab to side step rust borrow checker. Example https://github.com/orlp/slotmap/blob/master/examples/rand_meld_heap.rs

I don't know, only have some theories.

1. The name isn't particularly catchy or descriptive. It is the correct name for the data structure, but not too many people know the data structure.

2. People don't even know what they're missing. It's not a very Google-able problem to begin with. Slotmap provides an interesting solution to (circular) ownership and safe allocator / weak pointer design problems, but people don't recognize that they're having them or that slotmap could help.

As an example of this, the doubly linked list example (https://github.com/orlp/slotmap/blob/master/examples/doubly_...) can safely remove nodes from the linked list given their handle, in O(1), even from the middle, completely safely and correctly, even in the presence of double deletions or ABA memory re-use. You can't replicate this with just pointers, without introducing heavy refcounting solutions.

Nope, it's perfectly safe: https://github.com/orlp/slotmap/blob/master/examples/doubly_linked_list.rs.

I think keeping the relationship between child and parent elements in the node graph might be better accommodating better via a psuedo-ECS system, see https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/cnjhup/idiomatic_way_to_reference_parent_struct/. The https://github.com/orlp/slotmap crate looks promising. I think I'm just going to ditch the global shared HashMap in favor of something that can better accommodate child/parent relations.

I think the slotmap crate is similar to what you're trying to write: https://github.com/orlp/slotmap

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.