Implementing Unsafe Traits

Like with functions, you can mark a trait as unsafe if the implementation must guarantee particular conditions to avoid undefined behaviour.

For example, the zerocopy crate has an unsafe trait that looks something like this:

use std::mem::size_of_val;
use std::slice;

/// ...
/// # Safety
/// The type must have a defined representation and no padding.
pub unsafe trait AsBytes {
    fn as_bytes(&self) -> &[u8] {
        unsafe {
            slice::from_raw_parts(
                self as *const Self as *const u8,
                size_of_val(self),
            )
        }
    }
}

// Safe because u32 has a defined representation and no padding.
unsafe impl AsBytes for u32 {}