caution against ptr-to-int transmutes #95547
Merged
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I don't know how strong of a statement we want to make here, but I am very concerned that the current docs could be interpreted as saying that ptr-to-int transmutes are just as okay as transmuting
*mut T
into an&mut T
.Examples like this show that ptr-to-int transmutes are deeply suspicious -- they are either UB, or they don't round-trip properly, or we have to basically say that
transmute
will actively look for pointers and do all the things a ptr-to-int cast does (which includes a global side-effect of marking the pointed-to allocation as 'exposed').Another alternative might be to simply not talk about them... but we do want people to use casts rather than transmutes for this.
Cc @rust-lang/lang