lexical dependency is unmaintained and has soundness issues

[eric-seppanen]

Running cargo deny check dependencies on a project that includes wavefront_obj displays the following alert.

Please consider replacing the dependency on lexical.

ID: RUSTSEC-2023-0055
Advisory: https://rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2023-0055
lexical contains multiple soundness issues:

1. Bytes::read() allows creating instances of types with invalid bit patterns
2. BytesIter::read() advances iterators out of bounds
3. The BytesIter trait has safety invariants but is public and not marked unsafe
4. write_float() calls MaybeUninit::assume_init() on uninitialized data, which is is not allowed by the Rust abstract machine

The crate also has some correctness issues and appears to be unmaintained.

Alternatives

For quickly parsing floating-point numbers third-party crates are no longer needed. A fast float parsing algorith by the author of lexical has been merged into libcore.

For quickly parsing integers, consider atoi and btoi crates (100% safe code). atoi_radix10 provides even faster parsing, but only with -C target-cpu=native, and at the cost of some unsafe.

For formatting integers in a #[no_std] context consider the numtoa crate.

For working with big numbers consider num-bigint and num-traits.
Solution: No safe upgrade is available!

lexical v5.2.2
└── wavefront_obj v10.0.0