Unsafe Rust
The dark arts of Unsafe Rust
*_Unsafe rust is perhaps best thought of as an entirely new programming language, hidden in the dark depth of the Rust. Unsafe Rust is like a superset of Rust; it allows you to do all things Rust can do, as well as a few other things that are too wild for the compiler to verify. Unsafe Rust unleashes indescribable horrors that shatter your psyche and set your mind adrift in the unknowingly infinite cosmos.*_
With that said Unsafe Rust does not disable the ownership system or any of Rust's safety checks. It only gives you five additional superpowers that Rust doesn't have:
- Dereference a raw pointer
- Call an unsafe function or method
- Access or modify a mutable static variable
- Implement an unsafe trait
- Access fields of
unions
Using Unsafe Rust#
To use Unsafe Rust, enclose the code inside an unsafe block
An unsafe function
Unsafe Rust in Embedded#
In embedded programming, you interact with hardware by writing to specific memory addresses. Unfortunately, Rust doesn't allow writing to arbitrary memory addresses; so, we have to use Unsafe Rust. One of our goals in this project is to provide safe APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for these unsafe memory accesses; hence isolating unsafe code as much as possible within safe abstractions.
In addition, unsafe code isn't necessarily dangerous or has memory safety problems.
The intent is that the programmer should ensure that all the unsafe code validly accesses memory.
It is trickier to get unsafe code correct because the compiler cannot uphold memory safety.
Separating unsafe code from safe code makes it easier to track down the source of bugs faster when discovered.