Unsafe Rust

The Rust language has two parts:

• Safe Rust: memory safe, no undefined behavior possible.
• Unsafe Rust: can trigger undefined behavior if preconditions are violated.

We will be seeing mostly safe Rust in this course, but it’s important to know what Unsafe Rust is.

Unsafe Rust gives you access to five new capabilities:

• Dereference raw pointers.
• Access or modify mutable static variables.
• Access union fields.
• Call unsafe functions, including extern functions.
• Implement unsafe traits.

We will briefly cover these capabilities next. For full details, please see Chapter 19.1 in the Rust Book and the Rustonomicon.