Cool, I'm not sure that people know that we know each other and have some deeper mutual understanding. :)

> although of course that wouldn't work for running tests.

Why not? Unless you mean in the cross-compilation case, in which yeah, to run the compiled tests you'd need an emulator.

> in the specific case of Rust I believe rustc only compiles the tests and then something else like Cargo executes them.

It doesn't have to be Cargo, but yes, rustc produces executables for the tests, and you have to then run them.

> there's the same opportunity for end user memory being corrupted (due to miscompilation)

I agree for sure that the safety of the outputted binary is completely distinct from the safety of the compiler itself.

I think the reason that this framing specifically (in the post and in this comment) strikes me as odd is that "requires unsafe code" sort of implies that you need to use unsafe to fix the unsafety of the outputted binary. That just isn't the case. Of course, this is a serious bug that needs to be fixed, but there's just something about "doing memory unsafe things" in this area that like, I think can be a little mis-leading, even if that's not intentional. But I am going to sit with this and think about it, regardless, because I am not sure that my gut reaction here is completely accurate.

(And, hilariously, looking over some work my agents did on my compiler last night, they fixed some mis-compilations that occurred, entirely in safe code. I bet that's also part of why I'm in this headspace at the moment, it's not like those fixes required dropping down into unsafe to fix either!)