Rust is a young systems programming language that aims to fill the gap between high-level languagesâwhich provide strong static guarantees like memory and thread safetyâand low-level languagesâwhich 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 understand and evolve this important language: RustBelt and Stacked Borrows.
RustBelt is a formal model of Rustâs 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 unsafe language features.
@@ -12,7 +17,11 @@ slug: ThesisRustBelt is built on top of Iris, a language-agnostic framework, implemented in the Coq proof assistant, for building higher-order concurrent separation logics. This dissertation begins by giving an introduction to Iris, and explaining how Iris enables the derivation of complex high-level reasoning principles from a few simple ingredients. In RustBelt, this technique is exploited crucially to introduce the lifetime logic, which provides a novel separation-logic account of borrowing, a key distinguishing feature of the Rust type system.
-This thesis has won the 2021 ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award. +This thesis has received an Honorable Mention for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, +the ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award (as one of two recipients), +an Otto Hahn Medal, +the ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award, +and the Saarland University Dr. Eduard Martin-Preis.