In a previous post, I talked about a proposed approach to drafting the unsafe code guidelines. Specifically, I want to the approach of having an executable specification of Rust with additional checks that will signal when undefined behavior has occurred. In this post, I want to try to dive into that idea a bit more and give some more specifics of the approach I have in mind. I’m going to focus on this post on the matter of the proper use of shared references &T – I’ll completely ignore &mut T for now, since those are much more complicated (because they require a notion of uniqueness).

For the time being, I’m going to continue to talk about this executable specification as a kind of “enhanced miri”. I think probably the right formal way to express it is not as code but rather as an operational semantics, which is a basically a mathematical description of an interpreter. But at the same time I think we should keep in mind other ways of implementing those same checks (e.g., as a valgrind plugin).

I’m also going to focus on single-thread semantics for now. It seems best to start there, and extend to the multithreaded case only once we have a good handle on how we think the sequential semantics ought to roughly work (perhaps using an operationally-based model like promises as a starting point).

How to use shared references wrong

In Rust, a shared reference is more than a pointer. It’s also a kind of promise to the type system. Specifically, when you create a shared reference, the data that it refers to (“referent”) is considered borrowed, which means that it is supposed to be immutable (except for under an UnsafeCell ) and valid so long as the reference is in use. When you’re writing safe Rust, of course, the borrow checker ensures these properties for you:

fn foo () { let mut i = 0 ; let p = & i ; i += 1 ; // <-- Error! `i` is shared, cannot mutate. println! ( "{}" , * p ); }

But what about unsafe code? Certainly it is possible to violate either of these properties. For now, I’m going to focus on mutating borrowed data when you are not supposed to; in fact, freeing or moving borrowed data can be seen as a kind of mutation (overwriting the data with uninitialized). So here is a running example of an unsafely implemented function util::increment() , which takes in a &usize and increments it:

pub fn increment ( u : & usize ) { unsafe { let p : * const usize = u ; let q : * mut usize = p as * mut usize ; * q += 1 ; } }

Now, clearly, this is a sketchy function, and I think most would agree that it should be considered illegal, at least under some executions. In particular, if nothing else, its existence will interfere with the compiler’s ability to optimize. To see why, imagine a caller like this one; let’s further assume that the source of increment() is unavailable for analysis (perhaps it is part of another crate, or a different codegen-unit within the current crate).

fn innocent () { let i = & 22 ; println! ( "i = {}" , * i ); increment ( i ); println! ( "i = {}" , * i ); }

Ideally, the compiler ought to be able to deduce – even without knowing what increment() does – that *i equals 22 throughout this function execution. After all, the underlying temporary that i points at is clearly only accessed through a shared reference, which ought to be immutable. But, of course, that is not a valid assumption: increment() is violating its contract. So if we perform optimizations, such as replacing all uses of i with the constant 22 , those will be visible to the end-user. In typical C fashion, this can be justified if we say that the program encounters undefined behavior, but how can we make that more precise?

Instrumenting to detect failures

Earlier we mentioned that the key property of a shared reference is that the borrowed memory will remain both immutable and valid for the lifetime of the reference. The way that my mental model works, the borrow model is kind of like a (compile time) read-write lock: when you borrow data to create a shared reference, you have acquired a “read-lock” on that data. As a first stab at what our “augmented interpreter” might look like, let’s see if we can realize that intution. (Spoiler: this will turn out to be the wrong approach.)

The basic idea is that the interpreter would track a “reader count” for every bit of memory. When we create a reference (i.e., when we execute &i ), that will instruct the interpreter to increment that counter. The compiler would also generate “release” instructions when the borrow goes out of scope which would decrement the lock count again.

So in a sense our augmented program would look like this. The new assertions are written in comments; the interpreter would understand them, even if regular Rust execution does not:

fn innocent () { let i = & 22 ; println! ( "i = {}" , i ); // acquire_read_lock(&i); increment ( & i ); // release_read_lock(&i); println! ( "i = {}" , i ); }

Now, once we’ve inserted those instructions, then presumably increment() would dynamically fail as it attempted to execute *q += 1 , because the memory was “read-locked”.

Dealing with unsafe abstractions

So, this idea of a read-write lock seems reasonable so far – why did I say that this would turn out to be the wrong approach? Well, one catch is that it’s not sufficient in general to just freeze a single integer. Rather, when something gets borrowed, we have to freeze all the memory reachable from the point of borrow. That turns out to be problematic: given that Rust is built on unsafe abstractions, it’s not really possible to enumerate all that memory. To see what I mean, consider this program:

fn foo () { let mut x : Vec < Vec < i32 >> = vec! [ vec! []]; let y = & x ; // borrow `x` ... }

Here, the reference y borrows x , which is a vector of vectors. This implies that not only is the vector x itself frozen, so are all the vectors within x , and so are all the integers in all those vectors. This means that if the program were to create an unsafe pointer and navigate to any one of those vectors and try to mutate it, we should error out.

To enforce this, presumably the compiler would have to insert something like the acquire_read_lock(&x) we saw before. This instruction would cause the interpreter to navigate to all the memory reachable from x – but how can it do that? Vectors, after all, are not a built-in concept in Rust. The Vec type is just a struct that stores an unsafe pointer instead, ultimately looking something like this:

struct Vec<T> { data: *mut T, len: usize, capacity: usize, }

It’s clear that we can freeze the fields of the Vec , but it’s less clear how we can freeze the vector’s data. Is it safe or reasonable for us to reference data ? How do we know that the memory that data refers to is initialized? (In fact, since vectors over-allocated, some portion of that data is basically guaranteed to be uninitialized.)

We actually encountered similar issues when thinking about how to integrate tracing GCs (another topic that would make for a good blog post!). The bottom line is that whatever scheme you create, people will always want some way to apply their own customic logic (e.g., maybe the pointer isn’t stored as a *mut T , it’s actually a usize and you can only extract it by doing an xor with some other values). So it’d really be best if we can avoid the need to “interpret” an unsafe data structure in any way.

A second approach: cannot observe a violation

There is another way to think about the freezing guarantees. Instead of eagerly locking all the memory that is reachable through a reference, we might instead declare that the compiler should not be able to observe any writes. Under this model, modifying the referent of an &i32 is not – in and of itself – undefined behavior. It only becomes undefined behavior when that reference is later loaded and observed to have been written since its creation.

One way to express this is to imagine that there is a global counter WRITES tracking the number of writes to memory. Every time we write to a memory address m , the interpreter will increment WRITES and store the new value to a global map LAST_WRITE[m] – this map records, for each address, the last time it was written. When we create a shared reference r , we can also read the current value of WRITES and associate this value with the reference as TIME_STAMP[r] (you can think of it as some extra metadata that gets carried along somehow).

Now, when we read from a shared reference r that refers to the memory address m , we can check that LAST_WRITE[m] <= TIME_STAMP[r] , which tells us that the memory has not been written since the reference r was created (this may actually be stricter than we want, but let’s start here).

So, coming back to our running example, the code might look like this, with comments indicating the meta-operations that are happening:

fn innocent () { let i = & 22 ; // TIME_STAMP[i] = WRITES // assert(LAST_WRITES[i] <= TIME_STAMP[i]) println! ( "i = {}" , * i ); increment ( & i ); // assert(LAST_WRITES[i] <= TIME_STAMP[i]) println! ( "i = {}" , * i ); } fn increment ( u : & usize ) { unsafe { let p : * const usize = u ; let q : * mut usize = p as * mut usize ; // WRITES += 1; // LAST_WRITES[q] = WRITES; * q += 1 ; } }

Now we can clearly see that the second assertion in innocent() will fail, since LAST_WRITES[i] is going to be equal to TIME_STAMP[i]+1 . This indicates that some form of undefined behavior occurred.

Unsafety levels

One of the premises of the Tootsie Pop model is that we can leverage the fact that Rust separates safe from unsafe code to allow for more optimization without making it harder to reason about unsafe code. Although many specific details of the TPM proposal were flawed, I think this basic idea is still necessary if we are to achieve the level of optimization that I would like to achieve while avoiding the problem of unsafe code becoming very hard to reason about. I plan to write more on this specific topic (“safety levels”) in a follow-up post; for now, I want to take for granted that we have some way to designate “safe” functions from “unsafe” functions, and just talk about how we can reflect that designation using assertions, and in turn use those assertions to drive optimization.

Consider this variant of the example from my previous post about trusting types. Let’s assume that the function patsy() here is “safe code”:

fn patsy () { let i = & 22 ; let v = * i ; increment ( i ); println! ( "i = {}" , v ); }

In this code, the author has loaded *i before calling increment() , but the result is not used until afterwards. The question is, given that this is safe code, can we optimize this code by deferring the load until later? This kind of optimization could be useful in improving register allocation and stack size, for example:

fn patsy () { // "optimized" let i = & 22 ; increment ( i ); let v = * i ; // this is moved here println! ( "i = {}" , v ); }

In general, my goal is that we can drive whether an optimization is legal based purely on the assertions and things that we are using to instrument the code when we check for undefined behavior. The idea is then similar to how C optimization works: we can perform an optimization if we can show that it only affects executions that would have resulted in an assertion failure anyhow. So let’s see what our instrumented patsy() looks like so far:

fn patsy () { // instrumented let i = & 22 ; // TIME_STAMP[i] = WRITES // assert(TIME_STAMP[i] <= LAST_WRITES[i]) let v = * i ; increment ( i ); println! ( "i = {}" , v ); }

Based only on these assertions, there is no way to justify the optimization I want to perform. After all, increment() is free to update LAST_WRITES[i] because there is no assertion that states otherwise.

What went wrong? The disconnected is actually strongly related to my previous post on observational equivalence – I would like to optimize patsy() on the basis that increment() , being declared as a safe function, will only do things that safe code could do (or, rather, safe code augmented with the capabilities we define for unsafe code). That’s a pretty strong assumption – since it assumes we can fully describe the possible things the code might do – but we can weaken it by saying that, since increment() is declared safe, I should get to assume that any code that its callers could write that type-checks will not trigger undefined behavior. But that is clearly false, as we saw in the previous section: if the caller simply moves the let v = *i line down to after increment() , an assertion failure occurs.

We can capture some of this intution by saying that, in safe code, we add additional assertions at function boundaries. The idea is that when safe code calls a function (and, by definition, that function must be safe, since calling an unsafe function requires an unsafe block), it can rely on that function not to disturb the types that it has access to. So imagine that after every function call in a safe function, we assert that all our publicly accessible state is still valid. In this case, since i is an in-scope reference whose lifetime has not expired (in particular, even in a NLL world, its lifetime would include the call to increment() ), that means that the memory it refers to must not have changed:

s

fn patsy () { // instrumented let i = & 22 ; // TIME_STAMP[i] = WRITES // assert(TIME_STAMP[i] <= LAST_WRITES[i]) let v = * i ; increment ( i ); // assert(TIME_STAMP[i] <= LAST_WRITES[i]) println! ( "i = {}" , v ); }

Running with these augmented semantics, we see that increment() will yield an assertion failure once patsy() calls it, even though we don’t access *i again. This in turn justifies our compiler’s decision to move let v = *i below the call.

Its clear that, even with these stronger assertions, we are not able to fully check that some bit of unsafe code is a valid safe abstraction. In other words, we can show that it did not disturb the local variables of its caller function in any immediate way, but it may well have disturbed them in some way that will show up later (for example, increment might not immediately mutate *i , but it might make an alias of i that will be used later to perform an illegal mutation). However, we can hopefully show that the abstraction is safe enough for the compiler to do the optimizations we would like to do.

Ginning up metadata for false references

Another question that you quickly run into in this approach – and it’s a question we have to answer no matter what! – is what to do about references that are created in “unorthodox” ways. For example, what happens if I make a reference by transmuting a usize (note: not recommended):

// Don't do this at home, kids. fn wacked ( x : & T ) -> & T { let i : usize = x as * const T as usize ; let y : & T = transmute ( i ); y }

If the reference x has some “identity” as a reference, you can imagine that the machine might preserve that identity when x is cast to a usize , in which case TIME_STAMPS[y] == TIME_STAMPS[x] . Or perhaps the time stamp is reset. This is all strongly related to C memory models (e.g., this one), which also have to define this sort of thing (related question: at what point does a pointer gain a numeric address?).

In any case, I’m not sure just what the right answer is here, but I like how focusing on something executable makes the issue at hand very concrete. It also seems like that, as we thread this data through an actual interpreter, these questions will naturally arise (i.e., “hmm, we have to create a Reference value here, what should we use for the time-stamp?”), which will help give us confidence that we have convered the various corner cases.

Conclusion

The aim of this post is not to make a specific proposal, not yet, but to try and illustrate further the approach I have in mind for specifying an executable form of unsafe code guidelines. The key components are:

An augmented interpreter that has meta-variables like WRITES and LAST_WRITES that track the set of state. This interpreter will also have additional metadata for Rust values, such as a time-stamp for references.

and that track the set of state. An augmented compilation that includes assertions that can employ these meta-variables at well-defined points: before memory accesses and after function calls seem like likely candidates This compilation might take into account the “safety level” of a function as well

Using these assertions both to check for undefined behavior and to justify optimizations.

There is certainly plenty of work to be done. For example, we have to work out just how to handle “reborrows” (i.e., &*x where x: &T ) – it seems clear that the resulting reference should get the “time-stamp” of the one from which it is borrowed.

Going further, the approach we outlined here isn’t quite enough to handle &mut T , since there we have to reason about the path by which memory was reached, and not just the state of the memory itself. I imagine though that we might be able to handle this by creating a fresh id for each mutable borrow. When a memory cell is accessed, we would track the id of those that did the access, and then when an &mut is used (or the validity of an &mut is asserted, in safe code) we would check that all publicly accessible memory is either older than the reference or has the proper ID associated with it. Or something like that, anyway.

(Also, there is a lot of related work in this area, much of which I am not that familiar with. Robert Krebbers’s thesis formalizing the C standard is certainly relevant (I’m happy to say that when I spoke with him at POPL, he seemed to agree with the overall approach I am advocating here, though of course we didn’t get down to much level of detail). Projects like CompCert also leap to mind.)