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by MindSpunk 118 days ago
What is a safe ABI? An ABI can't control whether one or both parties either end of the interface are honest.

You can't have safe dynamic linking, dynamic linking requires you to trust the library you load with no ability to verify.
1 comments
josefx 118 days ago
> An ABI can't control whether one or both parties either end of the interface are honest.

You are aware that Rust already fails that without dynamic linking? The wrapper around the C getenv functionality was originally considered safe, despite every bit of documentation on getenv calling out thread safety issues.

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MindSpunk 118 days ago
Yes? That's called a bug? The standard library incorrectly labelled something as safe, and then changed it. The root was an unsafe FFI call which was incorrectly marked as safe.

It's no different than a bug in an unsafe pure Rust function.

I'm choosing to ignore that libc is typically dynamically linked, but linking in foreign code and marking it safe is a choice to trust the code. Under dynamic linking anything could get linked in, unlike static linking. At least a static link only includes the code you (theoretically) audited and decided is safe.

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