How does Rust know whether to run the destructor during stack unwind?

Question

The documentation for mem::uninitialized points out why it is dangerous/unsafe to use that function: calling drop on uninitialized memory is undefined behavior.

Answer 1

Using drop flags.

Rust (up to and including version 1.12) stores a boolean flag in every value whose type implements Drop (and thus increases that type's size by one byte). That flag decides whether to run the destructor. So when you do b = bar() it sets the flag for the b variable, and thus only runs b's destructor. Vice versa with a.

Note that starting from Rust version 1.13 (at the time of this writing the beta compiler) that flag is not stored in the type, but on the stack for every variable or temporary. This is made possible by the advent of the MIR in the Rust compiler. The MIR significantly simplifies the translation of Rust code to machine code, and thus enabled this feature to move drop flags to the stack. Optimizations will usually eliminate that flag if they can figure out at compile time when which object will be dropped.

You can "observe" this flag in a Rust compiler up to version 1.12 by looking at the size of the type:

struct A;

struct B;

impl Drop for B {
    fn drop(&mut self) {}
}

fn main() {
    println!("{}", std::mem::size_of::());
    println!("{}", std::mem::size_of::());
}

prints 0 and 1 respectively before stack flags, and 0 and 0 with stack flags.

Using mem::uninitialized is still unsafe, however, because the compiler still sees the assignment to the a variable and sets the drop flag. Thus the destructor will be called on uninitialized memory. Note that in your example the Drop impl does not access any memory of your type (except for the drop flag, but that is invisible to you). Therefor you are not accessing the uninitialized memory (which is zero bytes in size anyway, since your type is a zero sized struct). To the best of my knowledge that means that your unsafe { std::mem::uninitialized() } code is actually safe, because afterwards no memory unsafety can occur.