this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
35 points (97.3% liked)
Rust
7428 readers
44 users here now
Welcome to the Rust community! This is a place to discuss about the Rust programming language.
Wormhole
Credits
- The icon is a modified version of the official rust logo (changing the colors to a gradient and black background)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hmm...
As to LLVM and alloca, it doesn't optimise or even work well in practise. Some basic cases work, others are less well tested. There are lots of "should" that "doesn't" in practice in LLVM.
I have not looked at alloca in LLVM myself but from what I have heard from those who are experts on this, it is quite brittle.
https://docs.rs/bumpalo/latest/bumpalo/ (and bump allocators in general).
In general proving bounds for stack growth is very difficult. With recursion it is undecidable. This follows directly from Rice's Theorem. (This is my favourite theorem, it is nice to know that something is impossible rather than a skill issue.)
(Of course you could have a static analyser that instead of yes/no returns yes/no/don't know, and then you assign don't know to be either of the other classes depending on if you care more about false positives or false negatives. This is how the rust borrow checker works: forbid if it can't prove it is safe, but there will be safe code that it doesn't allow.)