As an introduction to this section, to borrow from the official docs, "one should try to minimize the amount of unsafe code in a code base." With that in mind, let's get started! Unsafe blocks in Rust are used to bypass protections put in place by the compiler; specifically, there are four primary things that unsafe blocks are used for:

• dereferencing raw pointers
• calling a function over FFI (but this is covered in a previous chapter of the book)
• calling functions which are unsafe
• inline assembly

Raw pointers * and references &T function similarly, but references are always safe because they are guaranteed to point to valid data due to the borrow checker. Dereferencing a raw pointer can only be done through an unsafe block.

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Some functions can be declared as unsafe, meaning it is the programmer's responsibility to ensure correctness instead of the compiler's. One example of this is std::slice::from_raw_parts which will create a slice given a pointer to the first element and a length.

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For slice::from_raw_parts, one of the assumptions which must be upheld is that the pointer passed in points to valid memory and that the memory pointed to is of the correct type. If these invariants aren't upheld then the program's behaviour is undefined and there is no knowing what will happen.