A Lightweight Formalism for Reference Lifetimes and Borrowing in Rust

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: A Lightweight Formalism for Reference Lifetimes and Borrowing in Rust
المؤلفون: David J. Pearce
المصدر: ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. 43:1-73
بيانات النشر: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2021.
سنة النشر: 2021
مصطلحات موضوعية: Programming language, Computer science, 020207 software engineering, 0102 computer and information sciences, 02 engineering and technology, computer.software_genre, 01 natural sciences, Type theory, 010201 computation theory & mathematics, Dangling pointer, TheoryofComputation_LOGICSANDMEANINGSOFPROGRAMS, 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering, Programming paradigm, Compiler, Tuple, computer, Memory safety, Software, Rust (programming language), computer.programming_language, Garbage collection
الوصف: Rust is a relatively new programming language that has gained significant traction since its v1.0 release in 2015. Rust aims to be a systems language that competes with C/C++. A claimed advantage of Rust is a strong focus on memory safety without garbage collection. This is primarily achieved through two concepts, namely, reference lifetimes and borrowing . Both of these are well-known ideas stemming from the literature on region-based memory management and linearity / uniqueness . Rust brings both of these ideas together to form a coherent programming model. Furthermore, Rust has a strong focus on stack-allocated data and, like C/C++ but unlike Java, permits references to local variables. Type checking in Rust can be viewed as a two-phase process: First, a traditional type checker operates in a flow-insensitive fashion; second, a borrow checker enforces an ownership invariant using a flow-sensitive analysis. In this article, we present a lightweight formalism that captures these two phases using a flow-sensitive type system that enforces “ type and borrow safety .” In particular, programs that are type and borrow safe will not attempt to dereference dangling pointers. Our calculus core captures many aspects of Rust, including copy- and move-semantics, mutable borrowing, reborrowing, partial moves, and lifetimes. In particular, it remains sufficiently lightweight to be easily digested and understood and, we argue, still captures the salient aspects of reference lifetimes and borrowing. Furthermore, extensions to the core can easily add more complex features (e.g., control-flow, tuples, method invocation). We provide a soundness proof to verify our key claims of the calculus. We also provide a reference implementation in Java with which we have model checked our calculus using over 500B input programs. We have also fuzz tested the Rust compiler using our calculus against 2B programs and, to date, found one confirmed compiler bug and several other possible issues.
تدمد: 1558-4593
0164-0925
URL الوصول: https://explore.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=doi_________::5487ed55fe8164b640e17e5982016aeb
https://doi.org/10.1145/3443420
رقم الأكسشن: edsair.doi...........5487ed55fe8164b640e17e5982016aeb
قاعدة البيانات: OpenAIRE