TY - GEN
T1 - Ownership is theft
T2 - 8th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems, PLOS 2015
AU - Levy, Amit
AU - Andersen, Michael P.
AU - Campbell, Bradford
AU - Culler, David
AU - Dutta, Prabal
AU - Ghena, Branden
AU - Levis, Philip
AU - Pannuto, Pat
PY - 2015/10/4
Y1 - 2015/10/4
N2 - Rust, a new systems programming language, provides compile-time memory safety checks to help eliminate runtime bugs that manifest from improper memory management. This feature is advantageous for operating system development, and especially for embedded OS development, where recovery and debugging are particularly challenging. However, embedded platforms are highly event-based, and Rust's memory safety mechanisms largely presume threads. In our experience developing an operating system for embedded systems in Rust, we have found that Rust's ownership model prevents otherwise safe resource sharing common in the embedded domain, conflicts with the reality of hardware resources, and hinders using closures for programming asynchronously. We describe these experiences and how they relate to memory safety as well as illustrate our workarounds that preserve the safety guarantees to the largest extent possible. In addition, we draw from our experience to propose a new language extension to Rust that would enable it to provide better memory safety tools for event-driven platforms.
AB - Rust, a new systems programming language, provides compile-time memory safety checks to help eliminate runtime bugs that manifest from improper memory management. This feature is advantageous for operating system development, and especially for embedded OS development, where recovery and debugging are particularly challenging. However, embedded platforms are highly event-based, and Rust's memory safety mechanisms largely presume threads. In our experience developing an operating system for embedded systems in Rust, we have found that Rust's ownership model prevents otherwise safe resource sharing common in the embedded domain, conflicts with the reality of hardware resources, and hinders using closures for programming asynchronously. We describe these experiences and how they relate to memory safety as well as illustrate our workarounds that preserve the safety guarantees to the largest extent possible. In addition, we draw from our experience to propose a new language extension to Rust that would enable it to provide better memory safety tools for event-driven platforms.
KW - Embedded Operating Systems
KW - Linear Types
KW - Ownership
KW - Rust
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84958665388&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84958665388&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2818302.2818306
DO - 10.1145/2818302.2818306
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84958665388
T3 - Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems, PLOS 2015
SP - 21
EP - 26
BT - Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems, PLOS 2015
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 4 October 2015
ER -