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I think the documentation should be very honest about how bad it actually is to use "unsafe". You don't want people reaching for it every time they think they'r

by ziml77 6y ago

I think the documentation should be very honest about how bad it actually is to use "unsafe". You don't want people reaching for it every time they think they're stuck without it, but at the same time you don't want people thinking they've written their code wrong because they had to use it. I think linked lists are a great example of something that causes Rust's ownership model to fall apart. I've seen it done with tradeoffs, but it's something that you're best off implementing with pointers and unsafe blocks (though you probably should just use a battle-tested implementation or consider if you'd be better off with a vector for cache locality).

zozbot234 6y ago
> I think linked lists are a great example of something that causes Rust's ownership model to fall apart. I've seen it done with tradeoffs, but it's something that you're best off implementing with pointers and unsafe blocks It's worth checking https://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/ghostcell/ https://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/ghostcell/ and https://github.com/matthieu-m/ghost-collections https://github.com/matthieu-m/ghost-collections for an alternate approach that's currently being worked on. Quite non-intuitive and it has yet to be proven 100% safe, plus it doesn't actually obviate everything you might want to do w/ potentially-aliased pointers, meaning that some desirable patterns are still off-limits - but it has the best chance of working out so far.