Code change:
As noted in which tracks the diagnostic issue, the standard library previously accepted code (with differing behavior) on a number of intrinsics with "intended to be const" arguments. Since , though, this code is rejected at compile-time. For example, this compiles on stable but not 1.54 (nightly as of this writing). I think at minimum we need to identify the set of code that changed behaviors and document that in release notes.
cc -- on the point about documenting this change in behavior in the release notes, would you be up for either identifying the set of intrinsics which changed behavior or documenting how to do so?
Looking back at the crater run, we only ran it in mode, which doesn't perform monomorphization. This is the reason why this wasn't caught earlier. The full crater run for beta is currently running, so we should be able to get a clearer picture of the breakage once it is done. Documenting this is difficult: the new behavior affects all intrinsics which use const arguments. A quick grep of stdarch shows 1741 intrinsics, of which about ~150 are stable.
This is in 1.54, not 1.53, so the currently running beta run won't catch anything, right? It may make sense to run a crater on the PR itself, though. It is worrying that so many intrinsics are affected towards a compile-error, vs. e.g. having a warning - perhaps deny-by-default - like clippy's on the atomic Ordering params...
run mode=build-only end= start= name=issue-
:okhand: Experiment created and queued. :mag: You can check out and . :informationsource: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
The mechanism used to validate the immediates using const generics is: offering the validation feature: a post-monomorphization error while evaluating a forcing the evaluation of the const for the const generic parameters of a given intrinsic: e.g. the above is as and the body of the intrinsic will start with a static assertion ensuring is indeed a 4-bit value. Note that I've linked to the more common macros, but this mechanism is applied throughout including arch-specific intrinsics and validations: e.g. , or . Any intrinsic using these macros can cause an error like in the OP with an argument that doesn't pass the checks, but this set of functions should be equivalent to: all the intrinsics which have been ported to . This means this mechanism is very well centralized and could be deactivated depending on the new crater run results, however that'd mean that we would return to the current situation of, depending on the intrinsics, having assertions or crashes in LLVM instead.
And the move to 'proper' const generics and the new validation are coupled because we would otherwise have undefined behavior (or be unable to codegen? -- what would happen)? Or can we decouple them?
We get LLVM assertion failures if invalid values reach codegen. I'm not sure if decoupling is even possible. For example, these don't work in debug builds:
It might be possible to do something involving specialization on const arguments... that seems rather fragile though. An alternative might be to change the LLVM IR generated by rustc, but it seems like currently rustc has no idea about the structure of these LLVM intrinsics so that probably won't be easy either. How is it then possible that the example in the OP here compiles and runs on stable?
Previously stdarch had massive statements to convert the value to a constant argument for the intrinsic.
:construction: Experiment is now running :information_source: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
:rotatinglight: Experiment has encountered an error: command failed: exit code: 1 :hammerandwrench: If the error is fixed use the command. :sos: Can someone from the infra team check in on this? :informationsource: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
retry
:hammerandwrench: Experiment queued again. :information_source: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
:construction: Experiment is now running :information_source: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
:rotatinglight: Experiment has encountered an error: command failed: exit code: 1 :hammerandwrench: If the error is fixed use the command. :sos: Can someone from the infra team check in on this? :informationsource: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
edit end=masterc1ac408d93bb7adaa3a51dabab9266e82eee8 start=master# name=issue-
:rotatinglight: Error: failed to parse the command :sos: If you have any trouble with Crater please ping ! :informationsource: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
name=issue- end=masterc1ac408d93bb7adaa3a51dabab9266e82eee8 start=master#
:rotatinglight: Error: it's only possible to edit queued experiments :sos: If you have any trouble with Crater please ping ! :informationsource: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
retry
:hammerandwrench: Experiment queued again. :information_source: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
name=issue- end=masterc1ac408d93bb7adaa3a51dabab9266e82eee8 start=master#
:memo: Configuration of the experiment changed. :information_source: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
:construction: Experiment is now running :information_source: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
:tada: Experiment is completed! :barchart: 56 regressed and 14 fixed ( total) :newspaper: . :warning: If you notice any spurious failure ! :informationsource: Crater is a tool to run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem.
All of the new failures that weren't in the previous report seem to come from , which is already fixed.
And it seems it's only 2 new crates that depend on this version of . So while post-monomorphization errors are tough errors to trigger and find consistently, the results are at least encouraging. It can also be noted that the rough "evaluation of constant failed" error in the OP, has since improved on nightly, to somewhat acceptable levels. <details<summaryHere's how it looks now</summary</detailsAnd could be improved still if we, for example, specialized in the handful of actually used widths. It would allow mentioning the range bounds in the error message (or we could do some of the const fn string formatting hacks here of course).
Closing as working as intended. The error message has been improved, and a description of the potential breakage will be included in the 1.54 release notes ().

Related discussion:
text: <ins> Version 1.54.0 (2021-07-29) ============================ Language ----------------------- - [You can now use macros for values in built-in attribute macros.][83366] While a seemingly minor addition on its own, this enables a lot of powerful functionality when combined correctly. Most notably you can now include external documentation in your crate by writing the following. ```rust #![doc = include_str!("README.md")] ``` You can also use this to include auto-generated modules: ```rust #[path = concat!(env!("OUT_DIR"), "/generated.rs")] mod generated; ``` - [You can now cast between unsized slice types (and types which contain unsized slices) in `const fn`.][85078] - [You can now use multiple generic lifetimes with `impl Trait` where the lifetimes don't explicitly outlive another.][84701] In code this means that you can now have `impl Trait<'a, 'b>` where as before you could only have `impl Trait<'a, 'b> where 'b: 'a`. Compiler ----------------------- - [Rustc will now search for custom JSON targets in `/lib/rustlib/<target-triple>/target.json` where `/` is the "sysroot" directory.][83800] You can find your sysroot directory by running `rustc --print sysroot`. - [Added `wasm` as a `target_family` for WebAssembly platforms.][84072] - [You can now use `#[target_feature]` on safe functions when targeting WebAssembly platforms.][84988] - [Improved debugger output for enums on Windows MSVC platforms.][85292] - [Added tier 3* support for `bpfel-unknown-none` and `bpfeb-unknown-none`.][79608] * Refer to Rust's [platform support page][platform-support-doc] for more information on Rust's tiered platform support. Libraries ----------------------- - [`panic::panic_any` will now `#[track_caller]`.][85745] - [Added `OutOfMemory` as a variant of `io::ErrorKind`.][84744] - [ `proc_macro::Literal` now implements `FromStr`.][84717] - [The implementations of vendor intrinsics in core::arch have been significantly refactored.][83278] The main user-visible changes are a 50% reduction in the size of libcore.rlib and stricter validation of constant operands passed to intrinsics. The latter is technically a breaking change, but allows Rust to more closely match the C vendor intrinsics API. Stabilized APIs --------------- - [`BTreeMap::into_keys`] - [`BTreeMap::into_values`] - [`HashMap::into_keys`] - [`HashMap::into_values`] - [`arch::wasm32`] - [`VecDeque::binary_search`] - [`VecDeque::binary_search_by`] - [`VecDeque::binary_search_by_key`] - [`VecDeque::partition_point`] Cargo ----------------------- - [Added the `--prune <spec>` option to `cargo-tree` to remove a package from the dependency graph.][cargo/9520] - [Added the `--depth` option to `cargo-tree` to print only to a certain depth in the tree ][cargo/9499] - [Added the `no-proc-macro` value to `cargo-tree --edges` to hide procedural macro dependencies.][cargo/9488] - [A new environment variable named `CARGO_TARGET_TMPDIR` is available.][cargo/9375] This variable points to a directory that integration tests and benches can use as a "scratchpad" for testing filesystem operations. [79608]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/79608 [84988]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/84988 [84701]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/84701 [84072]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/84072 [85745]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/85745 [84744]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/84744 [85078]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/85078 [84717]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/84717 [83800]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/83800 [83366]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/83366 [83278]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/83278 [85292]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/85292 [cargo/9520]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9520 [cargo/9499]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9499 [cargo/9488]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9488 [cargo/9375]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9375 [`BTreeMap::into_keys`]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.BTreeMap.html#method.into_keys [`BTreeMap::into_values`]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.BTreeMap.html#method.into_values [`HashMap::into_keys`]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.HashMap.html#method.into_keys [`HashMap::into_values`]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.HashMap.html#method.into_values [`arch::wasm32`]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/core/arch/wasm32/index.html [`VecDeque::binary_search`]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.VecDeque.html#method.binary_search [`VecDeque::binary_search_by`]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.VecDeque.html#method.binary_search_by [`VecDeque::binary_search_by_key`]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.VecDeque.html#method.binary_search_by_key [`VecDeque::partition_point`]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.VecDeque.html#method.partition_point </ins> Version 1.53.0 (2021-06-17) ============================