Publication

Safe Low-Level Code Without Overhead is Practical

2023
Conference Papers

Abstract

Developers write low-level systems code in unsafe programming languages due to performance concerns. The lack of safety causes bugs and vulnerabilities that safe languages avoid. We argue that safety without run-time overhead is possible through type invariants that prove the safety of potentially unsafe operations. We empirically show that Rust and C# can be extended with such features to implement safe network device drivers without run-time overhead, and that Ada has these features already.

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2023
Conference Papers

Abstract

Official source

Related concepts (21)

Type safety

In computer science, type safety and type soundness are the extent to which a programming language discourages or prevents type errors. Type safety is sometimes alternatively considered to be a property of facilities of a computer language; that is, some facilities are type-safe and their usage will not result in type errors, while other facilities in the same language may be type-unsafe and a program using them may encounter type errors.

C (programming language)

C (pronounced 'siː – like the letter c) is a general-purpose computer programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie, and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems, device drivers, protocol stacks, though decreasingly for application software. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems.

Rust (programming language)

Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language that emphasizes performance, type safety, and concurrency. It enforces memory safety—ensuring that all references point to valid memory—without requiring the use of a garbage collector or reference counting present in other memory-safe languages. To simultaneously enforce memory safety and prevent data races, its "borrow checker" tracks the object lifetime of all references in a program during compilation.

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Safe Low-Level Code Without Overhead is Practical

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