One Thousand Ways to Die in Rust FFI

Efficient FFI bindings are one of the core features of Rust; however dereferencing raw pointers, conversion between Rust and C types, memory allocation, …, all could possibly go wrong in FFI code and undermine the memory safety guarantee of Rust. The Rustonomicon and a few previous talks at RustFest discuss the topic of Rust FFI; but overlook the challenges in writing correct and safe FFI code. In this talk, we discuss a taxonomy of common pitfalls in Rust FFI with real-world examples. Moreover, we will review relevant principles and share our approach to effectively avoid the pitfalls.