align_offset, align_to: no longer allow implementations to spuriously fail to align#121201
Merged
Merged
Conversation
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
For a long time, we have allowed
align_offsetto fail to compute a properly aligned offset, andalign_toto return a smaller-than-maximal "middle slice". This was done to cover the implementation ofalign_offsetin const-eval and Miri. See #62420 for more background. For about the same amount of time, this has caused confusion and surprise, where people didn't realize they have to write their code to be defensive againstalign_offsetfailures.Another way to put this is: the specification is effectively non-deterministic, and non-determinism is hard to test for -- in particular if the implementation everyone uses to test always produces the same reliable result, and nobody expects it to be non-deterministic to begin with.
With #117840, Miri has stopped making use of this liberty in the spec; it now always behaves like rustc. That only leaves const-eval as potential motivation for this behavior. I do not think this is sufficient motivation. Currently, none of the relevant functions are stably const:
align_offsetis unstably const,align_tois not const at all. I propose that if we ever want to make these const-stable, we just accept the fact that they can behave differently at compile-time vs at run-time. This is not the end of the world, and it seems to be much less surprising to programmers than unexpected non-determinism. (Related: rust-lang/rfcs#3352.)@thomcc has repeatedly made it clear that they strongly dislike the non-determinism in align_offset, so I expect they will support this. @oli-obk, what do you think? Also, whom else should we involve? The primary team responsible is clearly libs-api, so I will nominate this for them. However, allowing const-evaluated code to behave different from run-time code is t-lang territory. The thing is, this is not stabilizing anything t-lang-worthy immediately, but it still does make a decision we will be bound to: if we accept this change, then
align_offset/align_tocan never be called in const fn,So I will nominate for t-lang as well, with the question being: are you okay with accepting either of these outcomes (without committing to which one, just accepting that it has to be one of them)? This closes the door to "have
align_offsetandalign_toat compile-time and also always have compile-time behavior match run-time behavior".Closes #62420