A lint for taking a mutable reference to a constant

[petrochenkov]

i.e. rust-lang/rfcs#885

This is currently legal and prints 0 1 because a and ARR[0] are actually references to temporaries and not to C and ARR, but this is confusing as hell.

const C: u8 = 0;
const ARR: [u8; 3] = [1, 2, 3];

fn main() {
    let a = &mut C;
    *a = 1;
    ARR[0] = 4;
    println!("{} {}", C, ARR[0]);
}

[mcarton]

😕 Rust

[oli-obk]

haha great catch!

[oli-obk]

*&mut 1 = 5; is legal, too xD

I think the let a = &mut C case should not be caught by linting against taking a mutable reference to a constant, but by improving the unused_assignments lint. This would also catch ARR[0] = 4. But I fear we need to do this analysis in MIR.

As an intermediate step, simply linting against having a constant on the lhs of an assignment op or taking a mutable reference to it would be good.

[petrochenkov]

@oli-obk
With &mut 1 or &mut (a + b) it's not so bad because it's fairly evident, that the reference is bound to a temporary, in case of &mut C or ARR[0] it looks completely like taking a reference to a lvalue.

[tgnottingham]

This is probably obvious, but just want to point out that this applies to calling methods that take &mut self. Silly example:

const VEC: Vec<i32> = Vec::new();                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
fn main() {                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
    VEC.push(1);                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
}

Also, I think that this would be more appropriate as a compiler warning or error, FWIW.

[camsteffen]

This is resolved by the new rustc lint 👆