Document aliasing rules

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the linked Rust issue (#74154) and the Nomicon’s related material, then determine what the Reference should say about aliasing and exclusive references to arrays of ZSTs. Done means the Reference contains a clear formal definition of aliasing and explicitly addresses whether those references may share a pointer value.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Context: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/74154

There it was assumed that exclusive references to two arrays of ZSTs couldn't have the same pointer value. Nothing in the language suggests that they can't have the same value, but I can't find any documentation explicitly stating that they can either. In fact, I can't find a formal definition of what aliasing means, period.

The nomicon has more content along these lines, but my impression was that the reference should include information like this even if it doesn't today.

Dominant language
Rust
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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