Rust Drop Tracker

Rust crate to check if a variable got correctly dropped. This crate is mostly useful in unit tests for code involving ManuallyDrop, MaybeUninit, unsafe memory management, custom containers, and more.

More specifically, this crate allows you to test if a variable is alive or has been dropped, and also detects when a variable gets dropped twice. These features can be used to detect bugs in your custom wrappers or containers that make use of unsafe memory management and cannot be checked at compile time by the Rust compiler.

Concepts

The main struct of this crate is DropTracker. Once you initialize a tracker, you call DropTracker::track on it to get a DropItem. Each drop item is identified by a key; the key can be used at any time to check the state of the item and see if it's alive or if it has been dropped.

Examples

This is how you would test that a container like Vec drops all its items when the container is dropped:

use drop_tracker::DropTracker;

let mut tracker = DropTracker::new();

// Create a new vector and add a bunch of elements to it. The elements in this case are
// identified by integer keys (1, 2, 3), but any hashable type would work.
let v = vec![tracker.track(1),
             tracker.track(2),
             tracker.track(3)];

// Assert that all elements in the vector are alive
tracker.all_alive(1..=3)
       .expect("expected all elements to be alive");

// Once the vector is dropped, all items should be dropped with it
drop(v);
tracker.all_dropped(1..=3)
       .expect("expected all elements to be dropped");

This is how you would test a struct that involves MaybeUninit:

use std::mem::MaybeUninit;

struct MyOption<T> {
    set: bool,
    data: MaybeUninit<T>,
}

impl<T> MyOption<T> {
    fn none() -> Self {
        Self { set: false, data: MaybeUninit::uninit() }
    }

    fn some(x: T) -> Self {
        Self { set: true, data: MaybeUninit::new(x) }
    }
}

// BUG: MyOption<T> does not implement Drop!
// BUG: The instance inside `data` may be initialized but not be properly destructed!

// BUG: The following code will silently leak memory:
let opt = MyOption::some(String::from("hello"));
drop(opt); // the String does not get deallocated

// DropTracker is able to catch this sort of bugs:
use drop_tracker::DropTracker;

let mut tracker = DropTracker::new();
let opt = MyOption::some(tracker.track("item"));

tracker.state(&"item")
       .alive()
       .expect("item is expected to be alive"); // works

drop(opt);

tracker.state(&"item")
       .dropped()
       .expect("item is expected to be dropped"); // panics, meaning that the bug was detected