The Rust Reference

Rust code, including within unsafe blocks and unsafe functions is incorrect if it exhibits any of the behaviors in the following list. It is the programmer's responsibility when writing unsafe code that it is not possible to let safe code exhibit these behaviors.

• Data races.
• Dereferencing a null or dangling raw pointer.
• Unaligned pointer reading and writing outside of read_unaligned and write_unaligned.
• Reads of undef (uninitialized) memory.
• Breaking the pointer aliasing rules on accesses through raw pointers; a subset of the rules used by C.
• &mut T and &T follow LLVM’s scoped noalias model, except if the &T contains an UnsafeCell<U>.
• Mutating non-mutable data — that is, data reached through a shared reference or data owned by a let binding), unless that data is contained within an UnsafeCell<U>.
• Invoking undefined behavior via compiler intrinsics:
  • Indexing outside of the bounds of an object with offset with the exception of one byte past the end of the object.
  • Using std::ptr::copy_nonoverlapping_memory, a.k.a. the memcpy32and memcpy64 intrinsics, on overlapping buffers.
• Invalid values in primitive types, even in private fields and locals:
  • Dangling or null references and boxes.
  • A value other than false (0) or true (1) in a bool.
  • A discriminant in an enum not included in the type definition.
  • A value in a char which is a surrogate or above char::MAX.
  • Non-UTF-8 byte sequences in a str.
• Executing code compiled with platform features that the current platform does not support (see target_feature).

Note: Undefined behavior affects the entire program. For example, calling a function in C that exhibits undefined behavior of C means your entire program contains undefined behaviour that can also affect the Rust code. And vice versa, undefined behavior in Rust can cause adverse affects on code executed by any FFI calls to other languages.