The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.15.1. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

If you have a previous version of Rust installed, getting Rust 1.15.1 is as easy as:

rustup update stable

If you don't have it already, you can download Rust from the appropriate page on our website, and check out the detailed release notes for 1.15.1 on GitHub.

What's in 1.15.1 stable

This release fixes two issues, a soundness bug in the new vec::IntoIter::as_mut_slice method, and a regression wherein certain C components of the Rust distribution were not compiled with -fPIC. The latter results in the text section of executables being writable in some configurations, including common Linux configurations, subverting an important attack mitigation, and creating longer startup times by causing the linker to do more work. For mostly-Rust codebases, the practical impact of losing read-only text sections is relatively small (since Rust's type system is its first line of defense), but for Rust linked into other codebases the impact could be unexpectedly quite significant. PIC issues are well understood and not Rust-specific, so the rest of this post focuses on the soundness bug.

The problem with as_mut_slice, a three line function, was discovered just minutes after publishing Rust 1.15.0, and is a reminder of the perils of writing unsafe code.

as_mut_slice is a method on the IntoIter iterator for the Vec type that offers a mutable view into the buffer being iterated over. Conceptually it is simple: just return a reference to the buffer; and indeed the implementation is simple, but it's unsafe because IntoIter is implemented with an unsafe pointer to the buffer:

pub fn as_mut_slice(&self) -> &mut [T] {
    unsafe {
        slice::from_raw_parts_mut(self.ptr as *mut T, self.len())
    }
}

It's just about the simplest unsafe method one could ask for. Can you spot the error? Our reviewers didn't! This API slipped through the cracks because it is such a standard and small one. It's a copy-paste bug that the reviewers glossed over. This method takes a shared reference and unsafely derives from it a mutable reference. That is totally bogus because it means as_mut_slice can be used to produce multiple mutable references to the same buffer, which is the one single thing you must not do in Rust.

Here's a simple example of what this bug would let you write, incorrectly:

fn main() {
    let v = vec![0];
    let v_iter = v.into_iter();
    let slice1: &mut [_] = v_iter.as_mut_slice();
    let slice2: &mut [_] = v_iter.as_mut_slice();
    slice1[0] = 1;
    slice2[0] = 2;
}

Here both slice1 and slice2 are referencing the same mutable slice. Also notice that the iterator they are created from, v_iter is not declared mutable, which is a good indication something fishy is going on.

The solution here is trivial, just change &self to &mut self:

pub fn as_mut_slice(&mut self) -> &mut [T] {
    unsafe {
        slice::from_raw_parts_mut(self.ptr as *mut T, self.len())
    }
}

With that, proper uniqueness invariants are maintained, only one mutable slice can be created at a time, and v_iter must be declared mutable in order to pull out a mutable slice.

So we made that change, and we're releasing a fix. In Rust we take pride in not breaking APIs, but since this is a new, minor feature, and the present implementation is spectacularly unsound, we decided to go ahead and release the fix immediately, hopefully before too many codebases pick it up — that is, we don't consider this a breaking change that requires a careful transition, but a necessary bug fix. For more about Rust's approach to ensuring stability see the "Stability as a Deliverable" blog post, RFC 1122, on language evolution, and RFC 1105, on library evolution.

We're still evaluating what to learn from this, but this is a good reminder of the care that must be taken when writing unsafe code. We have some ideas for how to catch this kind of problem earlier in the development process, but haven't made any decisions yet.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Let's go hack.

Contributors to 1.15.1

We had 2 individuals contribute to Rust 1.15.1. Thanks!