Improve error message: Unsupported operation vs. undefined behavior

[RalfJung]

Someone using miri and getting an error should learn immediately whether this is a problem in their code (UB, e.g. out-of-bounds memory access) or a problem in miri (unsupported operation, e.g. printing a pointer).

Any ideas how we could make that as clear as possible?

[RalfJung]

We could probably also improve the rendering of the stack traces.

[oli-obk]

A third category is panics. Maybe our error enum should just have these three variants with sub-enums for the concrete error?

[RalfJung]

There's also resource exhaustion (out of memory, out of time). But I'd put them together with panics, both are just "normal execution behavior".

[oli-obk]

Separating them from panics has advantages for rustc figuring out what to report which way. Reporting const eval resource exhaustion as "this will panic at runtime" seems bad

[RalfJung]

Well sure the error message would still look into the inner variant.

[RalfJung]

Related: rust-lang/const-eval#4

[lambda]

An example of this issue from Zulip chat; minified example from @shepmaster:

Trying to make a related example:

fn main() {
    let a: u8 = 42;
    let a_ref = &a;
    let a_ptr = a_ref as *const u8;
    let a_aligned = a_ptr as usize % 16;
    unsafe { a_ptr.sub(a_aligned) };
}

error[E0080]: constant evaluation error: a raw memory access tried to access part of a pointer value as raw bytes
 --> src/main.rs:5:21
  |
5 |     let a_aligned = a_ptr as usize % 16;
  |                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ a raw memory access tried to access part of a pointer value as raw bytes
  |
  = note: inside call to `main` at /root/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/src/rust/src/libstd/rt.rs:64:34
  = note: inside call to closure at /root/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/src/rust/src/libstd/rt.rs:52:53
  = note: inside call to closure at /root/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/src/rust/src/libstd/panicking.rs:293:40
  = note: inside call to `std::panicking::try::do_call::<[closure@DefId(1/1:1830 ~ std[82ff]::rt[0]::lang_start_internal[0]::{{closure}}[0]) 0:&dyn std::ops::Fn() -> i32 + std::marker::Sync + std::panic::RefUnwindSafe], i32>` at /root/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/src/rust/src/libstd/panicking.rs:289:5
  = note: inside call to `std::panicking::try::<i32, [closure@DefId(1/1:1830 ~ std[82ff]::rt[0]::lang_start_internal[0]::{{closure}}[0]) 0:&dyn std::ops::Fn() -> i32 + std::marker::Sync + std::panic::RefUnwindSafe]>` at /root/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/src/rust/src/libstd/panic.rs:388:9
  = note: inside call to `std::panic::catch_unwind::<[closure@DefId(1/1:1830 ~ std[82ff]::rt[0]::lang_start_internal[0]::{{closure}}[0]) 0:&dyn std::ops::Fn() -> i32 + std::marker::Sync + std::panic::RefUnwindSafe], i32>` at /root/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/src/rust/src/libstd/rt.rs:52:25
  = note: inside call to `std::rt::lang_start_internal` at /root/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/src/rust/src/libstd/rt.rs:64:5
  = note: inside call to `std::rt::lang_start::<()>`

And suggestion of the better supported alternative from @oli-obk:

what you usually want to do is to use https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.slice.html#method.align_to since that uses intrinsics internally to support all the use cases of miri. The low level operation for pointers is https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.pointer.html#method.align_offset

[RalfJung]

@shepmaster points out that it would also be a good idea for Miri to indicate how "certain" some case of UB is -- like, dereferencing a dangling pointer is definitely UB, but a Stacked Borrows violation is more experimental.