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Comment by krig | Hacker News Reader

Well, the statement is circular, colloquial speech doesn't have to be coherent. It's my understanding of what people generally mean when they complain about UB in the C standard, and it seems to be what gingerbill means too.

My take on what he is saying is that the odin compiler won't try to exploit that there is some behavior which is platform-defined or only knowable at runtime to do aggressive optimizations etc.

https://xcancel.com/TheGingerBill/status/1495004577531367425

To point out that use after free is possible in Odin is not really a gotcha unless you really are just arguing semantics. That's by design, just like use after free is possible in C or C++ or Rust too.

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> To point out that use after free is possible in Odin is not really a gotcha unless you really are just arguing semantics

In a language with UB, the use after free is UB. Which explains the nonsensical results.

If you're pretty sure this all makes sense, I recommend one tiny tweak to further unsettle you, change either (but not both) of the int types in my example to u8 instead. Now the use after free also results in type confusion - Odin has no idea this isn't the same type and so the machine code generated is for one type but the actual bits are for a different type with a different layout.

Bill's go-to is to blame somebody else, it's the operating system, or even the CPU which should define what happens and so it's not his fault. The thread you linked does this. But for type confusion those are Odin's types, nobody else can define how Odin works, the answer must come from Bill. What is supposed to happen here? Linux didn't define your programming language, Intel didn't define your programming language, this is your fault Bill.

Your understanding is completely wrong. UB means "undefined behavior" -- behavior that is not specified by the language standard or the implementation. UB being exploited by the compiler is a separate issue. Saying that there is no UB is saying that there's no undefined behavior; it is certainly not merely saying that the compiler doesn't exploit it.

I programmed in C for over 30 years and was a member of the C Standards Committee, which originated the language about undefined behavior ... I know what I'm talking about.

> To point out that use after free is possible in Odin is not really a gotcha unless you really are just arguing semantics. That's by design, just like use after free is possible in C or C++ or Rust too.

This completely misses the point and is a failure to understand at every level. Being able to use memory after being freed is not by design -- no one intends it, no one wants it. It's undefined behavior, and a program that does it is buggy. The reason that it's possible is because it's so hard to detect or prevent. To do so requires escape analysis, lifetime declarations, borrow checking, etc. etc. And no, use after free is not possible in Rust--not in safe code. It's hard to respond to that statement without being rude, so I will say no more.

Well, first of all, I guess I am wrong! Hey, I'm not Bill, just a user of the language.

A couple of clarifications, though: I did mean unsafe rust, not the safe subset. No need to get rude!

Second of all, I am of course not under the illusion that Odin prevents use-after-free (and thus, technically, it does allow UB I guess). I just don't think Bill is either. So clearly he doesn't mean UB by the same definition as you do.

_My_ use of UB has always been in the context of what a compiler will do during optimization, and the discussion I've seen in the context of C compilers is that they perform optimizations that remove code or change code in surprising ways because the way the code was written technically resulted in UB. But I'm neither a spec writer or a compiler author, so I don't really care that much about the actual definition of the term.

Anyway, best of luck in convincing Bill to use the term correctly as well! I won't mention UB when talking about the benefits of Odin in the future. :)

> So clearly he doesn't mean UB by the same definition as you do.

Wrong.

> so I don't really care that much about the actual definition of the term.

Yes, it's evident that you don't care what's true or about being accurate.

> Anyway, best of luck in convincing Bill to use the term correctly as well!

He does use it correctly, but his claims that Odin has no UB are incorrect.

Over and out.

As someone who knows what they're talking about, I'm curious to hear from you, why you consider use-after-free an undefined behavior and not an unspecified behavior instead?

Because as far as I know both undefined behavior and unspecified behavior are the behaviors that aren't specified in the language standard nor the implementation. So what's the difference?

A useful example to consider might be an uninitialized integer in C++

In C++ 98 "int x; foo(x);" is Undefined Behaviour. We said there's an integer named x, then, without initializing x, we passed it as a parameter to the function foo, evaluating the uninitialized value, literally anything is allowed to happen. Program crashes, deletes all the JPEGs large than 15 kilobytes, displays "Boo!" on the screen, anything the program could have done is something it might now do.

In C++ 26 "int x; foo(x);" is merely Erroneous Behaviour. The value of x is Unspecified, but it does have a value. This program might pass any integer to foo -- perhaps your compiler provides a nice compiler setting to choose one, maybe the person building the program picked 814 and so this calls foo(814)

This constraint is an enormous difference. In a sense the Unspecified behaviour is defined, it's just not specific. That variable x will have some integer value, so, maybe zero, or 814, but it can't be a string, or negative infinity, and evaluating it will just do what it would do for its value, whatever that was.

If you don't find that example illuminating enough, try another from a very different language, a data race in Java

Now, in C++ (or Odin though of course Ginger Bill will insist otherwise ad nauseum) the data race is UB. Game over, you lose, anything might happen.

But in Java the data race has Unspecified behaviour. Specifically, when the race happens the variable we raced has some definite value and it's a value it definitely could have had at or before this moment in a sequentially consistent program. So e.g. maybe we're counting clowns, we started from zero, thread A is counting 800 clowns, thread B is counting 600 clowns, but the threads race the same counter, legitimate values we might see at the end include zero all the way through 1400 clowns. -1 isn't possible, 1600 isn't possible, but 1234 is entirely plausible. That's Unspecified behaviour.

Sorry to pop in but I kind of need to clarify my own position even further here:

Odin has "undefined behaviour". SHOCK! HORROR!

The thing I bring up that people think I go "ad nauseum" about (like yourself) is just that the term "undefined behaviour" is in itself "undefined". This is why I try to make as many distinctions about the different kinds of "UB" out there, and even what the "U" means in "UB".

To quote you from earlier:

> ...Ginger Bill will engage in pointless semantic arguments in which he defines away your problem.

Yes... the entire discussion about "UB" is fundamentally a semantic thing, LITERALLY it's an argument about semantics. And if I can "define away [the] problem" in certain cases, then it's literally not Undefined Behaviour. I am not sure what else to say to your point here. The entire discussion around UB is fundamentally a semantics game and always will be. And when people complain about the "semantics game" part, they have not understood the problem in the first place.

Interestingly, the C++26 example you give is a brilliant example of this, it's an Erroneous Behaviour, not necessarily "undefined" or "unspecified".

In the case of race conditions in Odin? This is pretty much a brilliant example of _Unobservable_ behaviour because Odin shares a similar memory model to C, and thus it has to make assumptions. And when the programmer violates certain assumptions, the compiler cannot observe the broken code that easily, and thus it can easily produce unexpected behaviour due to it being unobservable.

I know have said things in passing, but it's a question of what to tell people. A lot of the people who bring up examples of UB bring up are usually TRIVIALLY definable, and things we have probably already defined in Odin (e.g. integer (under|over)flowing, integer division by zero, etc), but when I say what Odin's defined it to, they usually go one of two ways, either "I don't like that definition" or "but I wanted to use these specific passes in the compiler backed to do 'optimizations' with", both of which actually annoys me because I am not discussing with someone serious. In the latter case, "passes" are just algorithms that do things; they are not intrinsically "optimizations". To "optimize" something, you need well defined rules to optimize within, if the rules are ill-defined or arbitrary chosen, then how the heck can anyone call that "optimization"?

> In a language with UB, the use after free is UB. Which explains the nonsensical results. [https://odin.godbolt.org/z/8onn4hxP1]

Even the case of "use after free" that you brought up earlier, it is something which is not a language thing in certain cases, especially when Odin has custom allocators which are defined at the user-level. The language itself knows nothing about of the allocators and how they work, it cannot. So yes, Odin allows for "use after free" but and? We are not enforcing a specific memory allocation strategy at the language level, like other languages. But it could be technically well defined at the algorithm level of that specific allocator. Which leads to my many problem with this discussion: are flawed algorithms/code considered Undefined Behaviour now and thus make the language "UB"? Why is not just shitty code?

And I will literally go... your "nonsensical results" are just... allocator specific behaviour. Yes it's "nonsensical" to you, but Odin isn't C so stop applying its approach to things to it. C has its standard library as part of its spec and defines how `malloc` et al work. Odin doesn't have its core library as part of the spec and never will (base library will to a certain extent with room for implementation specified behaviour for certain defaults, e.g. what is the default `context.allocator` or `context.assertion_failure_proc`, etc).

> Bill's go-to is to blame somebody else...

No... my go-to response is to say where it should be defined, and if it is possible to define at _any_ level (if at all). So even in your case, you are blaming the compiler for something it cannot know if this is undefined or erroneous because it cannot know what you are doing, but the allocator itself could allow for it. `delete` could be a complete no-op and is for many allocators.

It's all about responsibility. What is responsible for what. So if you thin that's "blame", whatever, but that's the question. Is the compiler _responsible_ for "use-after-free" bugs? In some languages, yes. In other languages, no.

> Linux didn't define your programming language, Intel didn't define your programming language, this is your fault Bill.

No but they all put bounds on what is possible in the first place. They literally define the arena the language takes place in, and thus you are subject to their whims, regardless of my feelings about them. No it's not "my fault" anywhere, it's just a thing.

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If you want to discuss with me further on this, I'd be happy to do so. Other mediums other than a comment on Hacker News would be preferrable.

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P.S. nowhere on the Odin website itself do we say Odin has no "UB" nor even suggest it. So there is no official position on "UB" for Odin anywhere. My comments on Twitter or other social medias should not be taken as official in any way, and be considered closer to "conversation", especially Twitter.

P.P.S. Some of possible meanings of "U": Undefined (i.e. not-defined), Undefinable, Unspecified, Underspecified, Unobservable, Unknown, Erroneous (I know it's not a U), Unimplemented, Ill-Defined (different to Undefined or Underspecified, and again not a U), Defined-At-A-Different-Level (e.g. language, compiler, platform, core library, user's code, etc, and again it's not a U). It's an absolutely mess and things just need to be defined better about what you are talking about.

So funny thing, although I do periodically re-read older material I've written on Hacker News among other places as I've discussed elsewhere, I wouldn't ordinarily look at something like this after it's drifted off my first page until perhaps a month or more have passed. However, this afternoon Youtube's feed suggested I watch a video about exactly this topic by you, and it was pretty obviously a direct response to my comment written a few days after the comment so of course I checked here.

Lets do some high level corrections first, after all you might learn something and if not perhaps others will.

Data Races are not just race conditions. Race conditions are an ordinary part of our lived experience, the example I usually give is putting a cat out of your front door, then walking to the kitchen to close that door too, the cat might race around the outside and enter before you close the other door, and that's a race condition. To defeat this particular race, close other doors (and windows) first. A particularly nasty race condition seen in modern systems is the TOCTOU race, where the programmer checks something is true and later acts on that check but it is perhaps no longer true. Modern Unix systems have several features that exist mainly to prevent TOCTOU races in storage, such as the ...at family of filesystem calls.

Data Races are something much stranger, in my cat analogy Data Races are as if both Alice and Bob were able to pick up the same cat, Alice puts it out in the front garden, Bob puts it in the back garden, at the same time - now where is the cat? The situation is nonsensical even before we try to wrestle with its consequences. But data races are real.

Safe Rust doesn't have Data Races. By the SC/DRF theorem this means Safe Rust is Sequentially Consistent, which is the property humans need to be able to reason about non-trivial concurrent software. Now, you don't have to go this route, the easiest way to get SC is to write serial software, you can't have a data race if your program doesn't have any concurrency. But languages like C or C++ just give up and say well, data races mean UB. That's the default if you have concurrency and can't prove data race freedom. All bets are off, you lose, go home.

The C++ 26 initialization Erroneous Behaviour was precisely my point. You've greatly misunderstood the consequence of it previously being Undefined Behaviour here. Since it makes it clearer to see what's going on lets work entirely with C++ 26 semantics.

In C++ 26 `int k;` gets you a signed integer local variable named k which has some definite value of its type, the compiler has chosen what that value is, maybe it's six. It can't be negative infinity, or pi, or "Odin sucks" none of those are signed integer values. Evaluating k is Erroneous, tooling should (if able) alert you to your mistake, for example by terminating the program but even if it doesn't or can't, there was some definite value (maybe six).

Meanwhile in C+ 26 `int j [[indeterminate]];` gets you a signed local variable named j which does not have any definite value. This was also the consequence your definition of k would have had in earlier versions of C++. Evaluating j is UB. Absolutely anything might happen.

Why would we want this feature? Isn't it just worse? After all, C++ 26 adds a whole language attribute to preserve it, they must have some reason to do so? Rust goes much further, it has an entire type MaybeUninit<T> which exists to enable such dangerous behaviour, so clearly it's valuable enough to go write a lot of code.

Compiler Optimisation. The optimisation passes change your program with the intent to make it faster or smaller. They're obliged to preserve defined semantics when doing this. But they are not obliged to preserve any other properties, after all they were never defined. In your division by zero example, choosing to trap means that Odin has to emit code to check for zero and trap if that's not hardware behaviour. But in a language with UB for division by zero they don't need to emit the check. So hence UB is a potential for compiler optimisation.

You can also sidestep the check with a type system of course. For example Rust doesn't need a division by zero check when the divisor was a NonZero type, those are by definition never zero and so it's safe not to check.

> Why is not just shitty code?

If you prefer, Odin is shitty code. I think that's probably less helpful to anybody who is wondering about it than a more detailed explanation, but if you prefer to write "Odin is shitty code" in Odin's description and FAQ I guess that covers it and you'd see much less criticism on this topic.

But I suspect you don't mean that, which gets to the heart of the issue - which code was shitty? In Rust this is also well defined, and that might unlock for you why so many people like Rust so much. Instead of back-and-forth arguments about whether Jenny's code is wrong for calling Ralph's function with an inappropriate parameter, or whether Ralph's function is wrong for not handling Jenny's call, Rust chooses to nail this down in the language.

Exploring this in more detail led to me writing my first public Rust crate, named misfortunate.

> My comments on Twitter or other social medias should not be taken as official in any way

That's just not how anything works. If you said it then that's what you said.

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