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There is no memory safety without thread safety
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
Ralf Jung
Welcome at ralfj.de, my server for experiments and digital autonomy. On this machine I maintain several services which are part of modern life, and which I would rather not entrust to data krakens in the cloud (what if it's raining?):
- Popular posts
- 8
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- 1,731
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- #1,019 personal
Visit ralfj.de → On Hacker News Jul 2018 – Jul 2025
Software Engineering 7Programming Languages 5Systems & Performance 3Security & Privacy 1
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MiniRust
I have been thinking about the semantics of Rust – as in, the intended behavior of Rust programs when executed, in particular those containing unsafe code – a lot. Probably too much. But al...
3
Pointers Are Complicated II, or: We need better language specs
Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about how there’s more to a pointer than meets the eye. One key point I was trying to make is that just because two pointers point to the same address...
4
From Stacks to Trees: A new aliasing model for Rust
Since last fall, Neven has been doing an internship to develop a new aliasing model for Rust: Tree Borrows. Hang on a second, I hear you say – doesn’t Rust already have an aliasing model? I...
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Sandboxing all the things with Flatpak and BubbleBox
A few years ago, I have blogged about my approach to sandboxing less-trusted applications that I have to or want to run on my main machine. The approach has changed since then, so it is tim...
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Pointers Are Complicated III, or: Pointer-integer casts exposed
In my previous blog post on pointer provenance, I have shown that not thinking carefully about pointers can lead to a compiler that is internally inconsistent: programs that are intended to...
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“What the Hardware Does” Is Not What Your Program Does: Uninitialized Memory
This post is about uninitialized memory, but also about the semantics of highly optimized “low-level” languages in general. I will try to convince you that reasoning by “what the hardware d...
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Pointers Are Complicated, or What’s in a Byte?
This summer, I am again working on Rust full-time, and again I will work (amongst other things) on a “memory model” for Rust/MIR. However, before I can talk about the ideas I have for this ...