On the Dual Nature of Necessity in Use of Rust Unsafe Code

Yuchen Zhang, Ashish Kundu, Georgios Portokalidis, Jun Xu

Abstract

Rust offers both safety guarantees and high performance. Thus, it has gained significant popularity in the industry. To extend its capability as a system programming language, Rust allows unsafe blocks where the execution has low-level controls but loses the safety guarantees. In principle, unsafe blocks should only be used when necessary. However, preliminary evidence shows a different situation. This paper aims to establish a deeper view of this matter and bring endeavors toward improvement.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Zhang-al:FSE23,
  author    = {Yuchen Zhang and
               Ashish Kundu and
               Georgios Portokalidis and
               Jun Xu},
  title     = {On the Dual Nature of Necessity in Use of Rust Unsafe Code},
  booktitle = {{ESEC/SIGSOFT} {FSE}},
  pages     = {2032--2037},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2023},
}

On the Dual Nature of Necessity in Use of Rust Unsafe Code

Abstract

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