totally-safe-transmute VS watt

For example, there is this (pure safe Rust) code: https://github.com/ben0x539/totally-safe-transmute/blob/main... which accesses external resources (/proc/self/mem) in order to violate the safety guarantees.

The first is the totally_safe_transmute crate. I mean, who wouldn't love library code that has .expect("welp") and .expect("oof") as its error handling? But that's not even the really scary part. Issue #2 ("i hate this") remains open to this day, but for obvious reasons there's no chance of resolution. This post has some context and a line-by-line explanation of how it works.

You mean like this?

You can also do that in rust on linux: https://github.com/ben0x539/totally-safe-transmute/blob/master/src/lib.rs

I want to correct this statement: Rust can be safer, but not if a library you use contains unsound code. Unsoundness is most often caused by unsafe code, but not always (totally_safe_transmute, anyone?). There is a misconception that unsafe code blocks are always unsound and should be avoided at all costs, but they're completely fine if the safety contracts are upheld. In fact, unsafe blocks isolate the potential issues to make it easier to identify where undefined behavior may be occurring. unsafe code blocks are a feature of the language, and their usage should not be viewed as opting out of any safety the language provides, imo.

Just reimplement totally_safe_transmute in Zig. No need for unsafe.

Why transmute() when you can totally_safe_transmute()?

Well, there is always the totally-safe-transmute.

They should use https://github.com/ben0x539/totally-safe-transmute

The precompiled binary is not a sandboxed WASM binary. Despite the name "watt" it has nothing to do with https://github.com/dtolnay/watt . You can look at the actual code to see for yourself.

* Related: watt is one approach to pre-compile proc-macro crates using WASM.

In addition to thiserror and anyhow, our resident superhuman Rust-improving Robot, dtolnay, also developed an experiment in distributing precompiled proc macros as WebAssembly named Watt and, though I never bothered to create a Zulip account so I don't know what was said, I'm told there has been discussion around the idea of implementing something in that vein.

I think when we have Cranelift, Mold, and maybe Watt all working together then compile times will basically be a non-issue. It'll be a few years though.

Check out https://github.com/dtolnay/watt - it's a really interesting solution to the problem!

I really like the idea of Watt: https://github.com/dtolnay/watt Run macros in a wasm sandbox so they can't touch anything you don't explicitly allow.

I really wish there was more interest in getting something like Watt upstreamed.