rust-lang / rust-lang/rust-clippy

New Lint: *mut used

Open
#2,490 3 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

A-lint
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
13.5k
Forks
2.2k
Avg merge
2d 10h
Merged PRs (30d)
32

Description

Now that NonNull is stable, I'd love to have a lint that warns when any type has *mut T as a field, or any function takes *mut T as an argument. The lint would recommend using NonNull<T> (or Option<NonNull<T>> if the pointer can be null).

Most of the times I've dealt with raw pointers, it's when dealing with a C FFI, and I often forget to add null checks. Switching to NonNull everywhere means that anywhere I cross a function/type boundary I've either done a null check, or opted out with unsafe code.

Since there are plenty of legitimate use cases for raw pointers where NonNull would just make things more painful, this lint should be allow by default.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No file, test, or entry point is named in the issue. Start by locating existing Clippy lints for raw pointers and their tests; done means an allow-by-default lint detects the described fields and arguments and recommends the appropriate NonNull form without flagging legitimate cases.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
devtools
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.