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> supports a much larger set of features that even constexpr supports This sounds promising. Can you give examples? I don't know Rust at all, and the reason I

by tines 6y ago

> supports a much larger set of features that even constexpr supports This sounds promising. Can you give examples? I don't know Rust at all, and the reason I like C++ is its metaprogrammability.

tobz1000 6y ago
I believe in a talk[1] it was mentioned that Rust's const eval will support heap-allocated values (accessed as references). A quick search suggests that C++20 will also support this, although it may be safer in Rust as it can give a stronger guarantee that the static memory won't be written to. [1]https://youtu.be/wkXNm_qo8aY?t=888 https://youtu.be/wkXNm_qo8aY?t=888
steveklabnik 6y ago
Basically, the interpreter interpret's rustc's internal IR, so it can theoretically support the entire language. That's not a good idea for various reasons, though, so its capabilities are effectively on an allowlist, that we expand over time as we're sure we want to enable a given feature.
- tines 6y ago
  That seems like a really good design, as opposed to having an AST interpreter like I might do otherwise. But would this indeed support a "much larger set of features" than constexpr as was claimed?
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    I think that the earlier const evaluator was an AST interpreter? It's been a long time and I don't work on this code, so I'm not 100% sure. I don't know constexpr well enough to comment on that claim.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    It has been a while, and I’m remembering from a discussion of new features in C++20, but I recall that constexpr isn’t capable of fully supporting memory allocations made during evaluation, while Rust’s const fn will eventually be able to.
kibwen 6y ago
I think some clarification is warranted here, because Miri is intended to be used for more than just constant evaluation. In particular, Miri wants to be able to dynamically verify `unsafe` code in order to detect undefined behavior, which means that it will eventually want to support the entire Rust language. However, just because Miri supports any given Rust feature does not necessarily mean that that feature will be made available for constant evaluation; consider features that are non-deterministic (like RNG) or architecture-dependent/nonportable (like floating-point operations), and how const-evaluating such things could potentially cause memory-unsafety to occur when runtime output and const output differ.

by tines 6y ago

> supports a much larger set of features that even constexpr supports This sounds promising. Can you give examples? I don't know Rust at all, and the reason I like C++ is its metaprogrammability.

tobz1000 6y ago

I believe in a talk[1] it was mentioned that Rust's const eval will support heap-allocated values (accessed as references). A quick search suggests that C++20 will also support this, although it may be safer in Rust as it can give a stronger guarantee that the static memory won't be written to. [1]https://youtu.be/wkXNm_qo8aY?t=888 https://youtu.be/wkXNm_qo8aY?t=888

steveklabnik 6y ago

Basically, the interpreter interpret's rustc's internal IR, so it can theoretically support the entire language. That's not a good idea for various reasons, though, so its capabilities are effectively on an allowlist, that we expand over time as we're sure we want to enable a given feature.

tines 6y ago
That seems like a really good design, as opposed to having an AST interpreter like I might do otherwise. But would this indeed support a "much larger set of features" than constexpr as was claimed?
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  I think that the earlier const evaluator was an AST interpreter? It's been a long time and I don't work on this code, so I'm not 100% sure. I don't know constexpr well enough to comment on that claim.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  It has been a while, and I’m remembering from a discussion of new features in C++20, but I recall that constexpr isn’t capable of fully supporting memory allocations made during evaluation, while Rust’s const fn will eventually be able to.

kibwen 6y ago

I think some clarification is warranted here, because Miri is intended to be used for more than just constant evaluation. In particular, Miri wants to be able to dynamically verify `unsafe` code in order to detect undefined behavior, which means that it will eventually want to support the entire Rust language. However, just because Miri supports any given Rust feature does not necessarily mean that that feature will be made available for constant evaluation; consider features that are non-deterministic (like RNG) or architecture-dependent/nonportable (like floating-point operations), and how const-evaluating such things could potentially cause memory-unsafety to occur when runtime output and const output differ.