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29 lines
1.6 KiB
29 lines
1.6 KiB
9 years ago
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% Transmutes
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Get out of our way type system! We're going to reinterpret these bits or die
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trying! Even though this book is all about doing things that are unsafe, I really
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can't emphasize that you should deeply think about finding Another Way than the
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operations covered in this section. This is really, truly, the most horribly
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unsafe thing you can do in Rust. The railguards here are dental floss.
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`mem::transmute<T, U>` takes a value of type `T` and reinterprets it to have
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type `U`. The only restriction is that the `T` and `U` are verified to have the
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same size. The ways to cause Undefined Behaviour with this are mind boggling.
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* First and foremost, creating an instance of *any* type with an invalid state
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is going to cause arbitrary chaos that can't really be predicted.
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* Transmute has an overloaded return type. If you do not specify the return type
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it may produce a surprising type to satisfy inference.
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* Making a primitive with an invalid value is UB
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* Transmuting between non-repr(C) types is UB
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* Transmuting an & to &mut is UB
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* Transmuting to a reference without an explicitly provided lifetime
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produces an [unbound lifetime](lifetimes.html#unbounded-lifetimes)
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`mem::transmute_copy<T, U>` somehow manages to be *even more* wildly unsafe than
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this. It copies `size_of<U>` bytes out of an `&T` and interprets them as a `U`.
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The size check that `mem::transmute` has is gone (as it may be valid to copy
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out a prefix), though it is Undefined Behaviour for `U` to be larger than `T`.
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Also of course you can get most of the functionality of these functions using
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pointer casts.
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