IMPORTANT: THIS MODULE IS IN AN EARLY STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT

Please do not consider this module of Comprehensive Rust to be complete. With that in mind, your feedback, comments, and especially your concerns, are very welcome.

To comment on this module’s development, please use the GitHub issue tracker.

Welcome to the Unsafe Rust Deep Dive

This deep dive aims to enable you to work productively with Unsafe Rust.

We’ll work on three areas:

  • establishing a mental model of Unsafe Rust
  • practicing reading & writing Unsafe Rust
  • practicing code review for Unsafe Rust

The goal of this class is to teach you enough Unsafe Rust for you to be able to review easy cases yourself, and distinguish difficult cases that need to be reviewed by more experienced Unsafe Rust engineers.

  • Establishing a mental model of Unsafe Rust

    • what the unsafe keyword means
    • a shared vocabulary for talking about safety
    • a mental model of how memory works
    • common patterns
    • expectations for code that uses unsafe

  • Practicing working with unsafe

    • reading and writing both code and documentation
    • using unsafe APIs
    • designing and implementing them

  • Reviewing code

    • the confidence to self-review easy cases
    • the knowledge to detect difficult cases

“We’ll be using a spiral model of teaching. This means that we revisit the same topic multiple times with increasing depth.”

A round of introductions is useful, particularly if the class participants don’t know each other well. Ask everyone to introduce themselves, noting down any particular goals for the class.

  • Who are you?
  • What are you working on?
  • What are your goals for this class?