[kibwen]

I believe it's safe to assume that Rust's memory model is (a subset of) C++11's memory model, since that's what LLVM implements. At this point I don't see how any specification could deviate significantly from that without breaking tons of code.

[Jweb_Guru]

The Rust memory model is deviating from it a little in order to enable some norestrict-based optimizations that aren't really done for C, even though (as you know) LLVM can't really take advantage of them yet.

[staticassertion]

I imagine that in C if the compiler can prove that two pointers don't alias than it can elide a load?

[Jweb_Guru]

Sure, or with C++ TBAA it can do that too, but those rules work differently from the kinds of guarantees that Rust's type system provides. The C equivalent is (sort of) restrict, but it's used very rarely--so no one has really worked out what its semantics would be like if it were used at the same scale it is in Rust, and there are a lot of bugs.

[pjmlp]

It is very much compiler specific, and also depends if modifiers like volatile are present or not.