<p><em>Rust</em> is a young systems programming language that aims to fill the gap between <em>high-level languages</em>—which provide strong static guarantees like memory and thread safety—and <em>low-level languages</em>—which give the programmer fine-grained control over data layout and memory management. This dissertation presents two projects establishing the first formal foundations for Rust, enabling us to better <em>understand</em> and <em>evolve</em> this important language: <em>RustBelt</em> and <em>Stacked Borrows</em>.</p>
<p><em>RustBelt</em> is a formal model of Rust’s type system, together with a soundness proof establishing memory and thread safety. The model is designed to verify the safety of a number of intricate APIs from the Rust standard library, despite the fact that the implementations of these APIs use <em>unsafe</em> language features.</p>
<p><em>Rust</em> is a young systems programming language that aims to fill the gap between <em>high-level languages</em>—which provide strong static guarantees like memory and thread safety—and <em>low-level languages</em>—which give the programmer fine-grained control over data layout and memory management. This dissertation presents two projects establishing the first formal foundations for Rust, enabling us to better <em>understand</em> and <em>evolve</em> this important language: <em>RustBelt</em> and <em>Stacked Borrows</em>.</p>
<p><em>RustBelt</em> is a formal model of Rust’s type system, together with a soundness proof establishing memory and thread safety. The model is designed to verify the safety of a number of intricate APIs from the Rust standard library, despite the fact that the implementations of these APIs use <em>unsafe</em> language features.</p>