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Making Rust a Better Fit for Cheri and Other Platforms

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Re: Making Rust a Better Fit for Cheri and Other Platforms

#41
post #39

> It's important to note that the cast warnings (or errors) are not enough on their own to help make code correct: additional auditing will be required. However, at the very least, this will give programmers a good idea of where to start auditing their code [4]. Some people might choose not to adapt their code, or find it too difficult to do so, but my guess is that most people will choose to do so. I strongly doubt…

Maybe not. But I might change my code if it makes it easier to reason about its correctness. Especially in unsafe blocks and especially if I don't have to give up anything else (like perf).

Re: Making Rust a Better Fit for Cheri and Other Platforms

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re passing a pointer to safe Rust code, with the capability bound encoded into something “native” to the language, then you don’t need hardware capabilities at all.

You'd still need access to the capability interface to perform that checking at the unsafe/safe boundary

Correct, but once you've done that you can strip the capability information and pass the raw address around to the safe code because the compiler runs validation.
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