For now, this reference is a best-effort document. We strive for validity and completeness, but are not yet there. In the future, the docs and lang teams will work together to figure out how best to do this. Until then, this is a best-effort attempt. If you find something wrong or missing, file an issue or send in a pull request.

Behavior not considered unsafe

The Rust compiler does not consider the following behaviors unsafe, though a programmer may (should) find them undesirable, unexpected, or erroneous.

Deadlocks
Leaks of memory and other resources
Exiting without calling destructors
Exposing randomized base addresses through pointer leaks
Integer overflow

If a program contains arithmetic overflow, the programmer has made an error. In the following discussion, we maintain a distinction between arithmetic overflow and wrapping arithmetic. The first is erroneous, while the second is intentional.

When the programmer has enabled debug_assert! assertions (for example, by enabling a non-optimized build), implementations must insert dynamic checks that panic on overflow. Other kinds of builds may result in panics or silently wrapped values on overflow, at the implementation's discretion.

In the case of implicitly-wrapped overflow, implementations must provide well-defined (even if still considered erroneous) results by using two's complement overflow conventions.

The integral types provide inherent methods to allow programmers explicitly to perform wrapping arithmetic. For example, i32::wrapping_add provides two's complement, wrapping addition.

The standard library also provides a Wrapping<T> newtype which ensures all standard arithmetic operations for T have wrapping semantics.

See RFC 560 for error conditions, rationale, and more details about integer overflow.