Lambda the Ultimate

RustBelt: Securing the Foundations of the Rust Programming Language by Ralf Jung, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Robbert Krebbers, Derek Dreyer:

Rust is a new systems programming language that promises to overcome the seemingly fundamental tradeoff between high-level safety guarantees and low-level control over resource management. Unfortunately, none of Rust’s safety claims have been formally proven, and there is good reason to question whether they actually hold. Specifically, Rust employs a strong, ownership-based type system, but then extends the expressive power of this core type system through libraries that internally use unsafe features. In this paper, we give the first formal (and machine-checked) safety proof for a language representing a realistic subset of Rust. Our proof is extensible in the sense that, for each new Rust library that uses unsafe features, we can say what verification condition it must satisfy in order for it to be deemed a safe extension to the language. We have carried out this verification for some of the most important libraries that are used throughout the Rust ecosystem.

Rust is definitely pushing the envelope in a new direction, but there's always a little wariness around using libraries that make use of unsafe features, since "safety with performance" is a main reason people want to use Rust. So this is a great step in the right direction!