The report seems to claim the opposite:
> Looking at the bug itself, it is also very likely that this unsoundness has not caused memory unsafety by accident. While it looks easy to trigger, to exploit this you need an intentionally malicious Drop implementation.
I guess my take is that I'd rather assume this is exploitable in the wild until sufficient time has passed. Would be cool to see clippy pick up on this bug in older versions!
It is, but safe Rust merely makes it hard to do by accident. Leaking is not "memory unsafe" because is does not currupt anything, so it's legal.
This bug wouldn't be nearly as interesting if it "just" resulted in a memory leak. Memory leaks aren't considered unsafe in Rust because they can't result in UB in the same way as e.g., OOB writes. In fact, there are APIs accessible in safe Rust which explicitly leak memory! [0]
This bug is effectively a use-after-free, which is definitely something that the Rust compiler should catch.
> Would be cool to see clippy pick up on this bug in older versions!
No need for that. A future version of the Rust compiler that incorporates a fix should reject the incorrect code, so all you'd need to do is compile older code with that new compiler.
Possibly. I'm no rust expert, so I had the read the code slowly, building up a mental model of the types being used. For me, the effort that required is one of the more painful aspects of Rust.
Nonetheless when I got to this line, I stopped reading:
q.0 = Some(&l);
I write lots of code that doesn't compile of course. It's perfectly safe because the compiler catches it. Right now, I feel like a climber at the top of a mountain who just discovered he forgot to attach his safety harness.
Who knows. Maybe all of crates.io will compile with the fixed compiler, because this is a mistake humans or LLM's never make. We will see.
You don't need 'static to trigger the bug [0]
[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/164250#issuecomment...
If that's true it's not a very complex or subtle bug. The very first response of "How on earth was this not found before this???" seems entirely appropriate to me.