explain Miri limitations

This commit is contained in:
Ralf Jung 2019-03-26 10:07:22 +01:00
parent b06879c1bd
commit 63b4a7661d

View file

@ -19,6 +19,26 @@ Miri has already discovered some [real-world bugs](#bugs-found-by-miri). If you
found a bug with Miri, we'd appreciate if you tell us and we'll add it to the
list!
Be aware that Miri will not catch all possible errors in your program, and
cannot run all programs:
* There are still plenty of open questions around the basic invariants for some
types and when these invariants even have to hold, so if you program runs fine
in Miri right now that is by no means a guarantee that it is UB-free when
these questions get answered.
* If the program relies on unspecified details of how data is laid out, it will
still run fine in Miri -- but might break (including causing UB) on different
compiler versions or different platforms.
* Miri is fully deterministic and does not actually pick a base address in
virtual memory for the program's allocations. If program behavior depends on
the base address of an allocation, Miri will stop execution (with a few
exceptions to make some common pointer comparisons work).
* Miri runs the program as a platform-independent interpreter, so the program
has no access to any platform-specific APIs or FFI. A few APIs have been
implemented (such as printing to stdout) but most have not: for example, Miri
currently does not support concurrency, or networking, or file system access,
or gathering entropy from the system.
[rust]: https://www.rust-lang.org/
[mir]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1211-mir.md
[`unreachable_unchecked`]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/hint/fn.unreachable_unchecked.html