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*************
Memory Safety
*************

In general, Crowbar does its best to ensure that code will not exhibit any of the following memory errors (pulled from `Wikipedia's list of memory errors`_.
However, sometimes the compiler knows less than the programmer, and so code that looks dangerous is actually fine.
Crowbar allows programmers to suspend the memory safety checks with the `fragile` keyword.

.. _Wikipedia's list of memory errors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_safety#Types_of_memory_errors

Access errors
=============

Buffer overflow
---------------

Crowbar addresses buffer overflow with bounds checking.
In C, the type ``uint8_t *`` can point to a single byte, a null-terminated string of unknown length, a buffer of fixed size, or nothing at all.
In Crowbar, the type ``uint8 *`` can only point to either a single byte or nothing at all.
If a buffer is declared as ``uint8[50] name;`` then it has type ``uint8[50]``, and can be implicitly converted to ``(uint8[50])*``, a pointer-to-50-bytes.
If memory is dynamically allocated, it works as follows::

    void process(uintsize bufferSize, uint8[bufferSize] buffer) {
        // do some work with buffer, given that we know its size
    }

    int8 main(uintsize argc, (uint8[1024?])[argc] argv) {
        uintsize bufferSize = getBufferSize();
        (uint8[bufferSize])* buffer = malloc(bufferSize);
        process(bufferSize, buffer);
        free(buffer);
    }

Note that ``malloc`` as part of the Crowbar standard library has signature ``(void[size])* malloc(uintsize size);`` and so no cast is needed above.
In C, ``buffer`` in ``main`` would have type pointer-to-VLA-of-char, but ``buffer`` in ``process`` would have type VLA-of-char, and this conversion would emit a compiler warning.
However, in Crowbar, a ``(T[N])*`` is always implicitly convertible to ``T[N]``, so no warning exists.

Note as well that the type of ``argv`` is complicated.
This is because the elements of ``argv`` have unconstrained size.

.. todo:: figure out if that's the right way to handle that

Buffer over-read
----------------

bounds checking again

Race condition
--------------

uhhhhh idk

Page fault
----------

bounds checking, dubious-pointer checking

Use after free
--------------

``free(&x);`` will set ``x = NULL;``
``owned`` and ``borrowed`` keywords

Uninitialized variables
=======================

forbid them in syntax

Null pointer dereference
------------------------

dubious-pointer checking

Wild pointers
-------------

dubious-pointer checking

Memory leak
===========

Stack exhaustion
----------------

uhhhhhh idk

Heap exhaustion
---------------

that counts as error handling, just the `malloc`-shaped kind

Double free
-----------

this is just use-after-free but the use is calling free on it

Invalid free
------------

don't do that

Mismatched free
---------------

how does that even happen

Unwanted aliasing
-----------------

uhhh don't do that?