As others have said, in a low-level setting like this it would be very difficult to ensure total safety, which depends on complex data structure invariants. Th

As others have said, in a low-level setting like this it would be very difficult to ensure total safety, which depends on complex data structure invariants. That said, Rust is able to eliminate some sources of unsafety here -- in particular, it guarantees that you have pinned to an epoch before you get your hands on any snapshots, and provides statically safe access to the snapshots for as long as you're pinned. This is very similar to the way that Rust deals with locks, which is explained more in an earlier post: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.html http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.ht...