This commit rewrites the runtime crate to provide safety in the face
of recursive calls to the guest. The basic principle is that
`GuestMemory` is now a trait which dynamically returns the
pointer/length pair. This also has an implicit contract (hence the
`unsafe` trait) that the pointer/length pair point to a valid list of
bytes in host memory "until something is reentrant".
After this changes the various suite of `Guest*` types were rewritten.
`GuestRef` and `GuestRefMut` were both removed since they cannot safely
exist. The `GuestPtrMut` type was removed for simplicity, and the final
`GuestPtr` type subsumes `GuestString` and `GuestArray`. This means
that there's only one guest pointer type, `GuestPtr<'a, T>`, where `'a`
is the borrow into host memory, basically borrowing the `GuestMemory`
trait object itself.
Some core utilities are exposed on `GuestPtr`, but they're all 100%
safe. Unsafety is now entirely contained within a few small locations:
* Implementations of the `GuestType` for primitive types (e.g. `i8`,
`u8`, etc) use `unsafe` to read/write memory. The `unsafe` trait of
`GuestMemory` though should prove that they're safe.
* `GuestPtr<'_, str>` has a method which validates utf-8 contents, and
this requires `unsafe` internally to read all the bytes. This is
guaranteed to be safe however given the contract of `GuestMemory`.
And that's it! Everything else is a bunch of safe combinators all built
up on the various utilities provided by `GuestPtr`. The general idioms
are roughly the same as before, with various tweaks here and there. A
summary of expected idioms are:
* For small values you'd `.read()` or `.write()` very quickly. You'd
pass around the type itself.
* For strings, you'd pass `GuestPtr<'_, str>` down to the point where
it's actually consumed. At that moment you'd either decide to copy it
out (a safe operation) or you'd get a raw view to the string (an
unsafe operation) and assert that you won't call back into wasm while
you're holding that pointer.
* Arrays are similar to strings, passing around `GuestPtr<'_, [T]>`.
Arrays also have a `iter()` method which yields an iterator of
`GuestPtr<'_, T>` for convenience.
Overall there's still a lot of missing documentation on the runtime
crate specifically around the safety of the `GuestMemory` trait as well
as how the utilities/methods are expected to be used. Additionally
there's utilities which aren't currently implemented which would be easy
to implement. For example there's no method to copy out a string or a
slice, although that would be pretty easy to add.
In any case I'm curious to get feedback on this approach and see what
y'all think!
This commit puts context object, i.e., the implementor of the
WASI snapshot, behind a reference `&self` rather than a mutable
reference `&mut self`. As suggested by @alexcrichton, this gives
the implementor the possibility to determine how it handles its
interior mutability.
