Pointers Are Complicated II, or: We need better language specs

First of all: fantastic article. In-depth, insightful, and the examples are absolutely top-notch. On the razor's edge between accessible and profound. Hats off to the author. I will say that the problems seem to lie in a few interesting interlanguage quirks, and not so much on language specs. For example, LLVM and C have different definitions of "undefined behavior"[1] -- this is pointed out when looking at the `poison` identifier. In LLVM this might just be a weird side-effect we…

Great series of blog posts, I link them every chance I get. Important to note that in the years since this post was written, provenance has become an explicitly accepted consideration of the Rust memory model ( https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ptr/index.html#provenance ), and standard APIs have been stabilized for working with pointers in ways that preserve provenance: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ptr/index.html#strict-provenan...

dupe, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42878450