cargo careful: run your Rust code with extra careful debug checking
Did you know that the standard library is full of useful checks that users never get to see?
There are plenty of debug assertions in the standard library that will do things like check that char::from_u32_unchecked
is called on a valid char
, that CStr::from_bytes_with_nul_unchecked
does not have internal nul bytes, or that pointer functions such as copy
or copy_nonoverlapping
are called on suitably aligned non-null (and non-overlapping) pointers.
However, the regular standard library that is distributed by rustup is compiled without debug assertions, so there is no easy way for users to benefit from all this extra checking.
cargo careful
is here to close this gap:
when invoked the first time, it builds a standard library with debug assertions from source, and then runs your program or test suite with that standard library.
Installing cargo careful
is as easy as cargo install cargo-careful
, and then you can do cargo +nightly careful run
/cargo +nightly careful test
to execute your binary crates and test suites with an extra amount of debug checking.
This will naturally be slower than a regular debug or release build, but it is much faster than executing your program in Miri and still helps find some Undefined Behavior.
Unlike Miri, it is fully FFI-compatible (though the code behind the FFI barrier is completely unchecked).
Of course Miri is much more thorough and cargo careful
will miss many problems (for instance, it cannot detect out-of-bounds pointer arithmetic – but it does perform bounds checking on get_unchecked
slice accesses).
Note that for now, some of these checks (in particular for raw pointer methods) cause an abrupt abort of the program via SIGILL without a nice error message or backtrace.
There are probably ways to improve this in the future.
Meanwhile, if you have some unsafe
code that for one reason or another you cannot test with Miri, give cargo careful
a try and let me know how it is doing. :)
By the way, I am soon starting as a professor at ETH Zürich, so if you are interested in working with me on programming language theory as a master student, PhD student, or post-doc, then please reach out!
Posted on Ralf's Ramblings on Sep 26, 2022.
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