11.3. Behavior considered undefined

Behavior considered undefined

The following is a list of behavior which is forbidden in all Rust code, including within unsafe blocks and unsafe functions. Type checking provides the guarantee that these issues are never caused by safe code.

• Data races
• Dereferencing a null/dangling raw pointer
• Reads of undef (uninitialized) memory
• Breaking the pointer aliasing rules with raw pointers (a subset of the rules used by C)
• &mut T and &T follow LLVM’s scoped noalias model, except if the &T contains an UnsafeCell<U>. Unsafe code must not violate these aliasing guarantees.
• Mutating non-mutable data (that is, data reached through a shared reference or data owned by a let binding), unless that data is contained within an UnsafeCell<U>.
• Invoking undefined behavior via compiler intrinsics:
  • Indexing outside of the bounds of an object with std::ptr::offset (offset intrinsic), with the exception of one byte past the end which is permitted.
  • Using std::ptr::copy_nonoverlapping_memory (memcpy32/memcpy64 intrinsics) on overlapping buffers
• Invalid values in primitive types, even in private fields/locals:
  • Dangling/null references or boxes
  • A value other than false (0) or true (1) in a bool
  • A discriminant in an enum not included in the type definition
  • A value in a char which is a surrogate or above char::MAX
  • Non-UTF-8 byte sequences in a str
• Unwinding into Rust from foreign code or unwinding from Rust into foreign code. Rust's failure system is not compatible with exception handling in other languages. Unwinding must be caught and handled at FFI boundaries.