On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 3:06 PM Tamir Duberstein [off-list ref] wrote:

On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 1:36 PM Benno Lossin [off-list ref] wrote:

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On Wed Mar 26, 2025 at 5:57 PM CET, Tamir Duberstein wrote:

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In the current code you're looking at, yes. But in the code I have
locally I'm transmuting `[u8]` to `BStr`. See my earlier reply where I
said "Hmm, looking at this again we can just transmute ref-to-ref and
avoid pointers entirely. We're already doing that in
`CStr::from_bytes_with_nul_unchecked`".

`CStr::from_bytes_with_nul_unchecked` does the transmute with
references. That is a usage that the docs of `transmute` explicitly
recommend to change to an `as` cast [1].

RIght. That guidance was written in 2016
(https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/34609) and doesn't present any
rationale for `as` casts being preferred to transmute. I posted a
comment in the most relevant issue I could find:
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/34249#issuecomment-2755316610.

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No idea about provenance still.

Well that's not surprising, nobody was thinking about provenance in
2016. But I really don't think we should blindly follow the advice in
this case. It doesn't make an iota of sense to me - does it make sense
to you?

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[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/fn.transmute.html#alternatives

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I tried to find some existing issues about the topic and found that
there exists a clippy lint `transmute_ptr_to_ptr`. There is an issue
asking for a better justification [1] and it seems like nobody provided
one there. Maybe we should ask the opsem team what happens to provenance
when transmuting?

Yeah, we should do this - but again: not relevant in this discussion.

I think it's pretty relevant.

It's not relevant because we're no longer talking about transmuting
pointer to pointer. The two options are:
1. transmute reference to reference.
2. coerce reference to pointer, `as` cast pointer to pointer (triggers
`ptr_as_ptr`), reborrow pointer to reference.

If anyone can help me understand why (2) is better than (1), I'd
certainly appreciate it.

Turns out there's a tortured past even in the standard library. In
2017 someone replaces trasmutes with pointer casts:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/2633b85ab2c89822d2c227fc9e81c6ec1c0ed9b6

In 2020 someone changes it back to transmute:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/75157/files

See also https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/34609#issuecomment-230559871
which makes my point better than I have, particularly this snippet:
"In addition, casting through raw pointers removes the check that both
types have the same size that transmute does provide.".