Inline Assembly

[nico-abram]

This is mostly a question. After reading about vale's safety claims, and it's various comparisons with C++ and rust, I'm wondering how it plans to handle inline assembly, which is necessary for many C++/rust usecases.

[Verdagon]

Hey, good question, and you've inspired me to add this page to the guide: https://vale.dev/guide/unsafe

I think these unsafe blocks actually give us a really nice place to put inline assembly.

Some caveats:

• Right now, the unsafe block only has read-only access to the surrounding data, but I'm looking into relaxing the pure restriction on those unsafe blocks, there's probably a way to do that without interfering with other features (i.e. deterministic replayability).
• A rare bit of overhead: when an unsafe region's struct contains a reference into the safe region, the compiler will have to do an xor, rotate, and assertion to maintain memory safety of the safe region. Though, these can both be overridden, so maybe that's not so much of a problem.

I'd love to hear more, since I've rarely gone down to assembly for my systems programming endeavors. What would you like to see here, and what languages have done particularly well with their inline assembly features?