Title: Rust Distilled: An Expressive Tower of Languages,
Abstract: Rust represents a major advancement in production programming languages
because of its success in bridging the gap between high-level application
programming and low-level systems programming. At the heart of its design lies
a novel approach to ownership that remains highly programmable.
In this talk, we will describe our ongoing work on designing a formal
semantics for Rust that captures ownership and borrowing without the details of
lifetime analysis. This semantics models a high-level understanding of
ownership and as a result is close to source-level Rust (but with full type
annotations) which differs from the recent RustBelt effort that essentially
models MIR, a CPS-style IR used in the Rust compiler. Further, while RustBelt
aims to verify the safety of unsafe code in Rust's standard library, we model
standard library APIs as primitives, which is sufficient to reason about their
behavior. This yields a simpler model of Rust and its type system that we think
researchers will find easier to use as a starting point for investigating Rust
extensions. Unlike RustBelt, we aim to prove type soundness using progress and
preservation instead of a Kripke logical relation. Finally, our semantics is a
family of languages of increasing expressive power, where subsequent levels
have features that are impossible to define in previous levels. Following
Felleisen, expressive power is defined in terms of observational equivalence.
Separating the language into different levels of expressive power should
provide a framework for future work on Rust verification and compiler
optimization.