The Mezzo programming language

I saw a link to the Mezzo programming language on Hacker News, and I came here to see what had already been discussed. To my surprise there seems to be hardly a mention about it. So I figured I'd post and perhaps stir up a discussion.

According to the Mezzo website the language has been formalized in Coq and is:

... a programming language in the ML tradition, which places strong emphasis on the control of aliasing and access to mutable memory. A balance between simplicity and expressiveness is achieved by marrying a static discipline of permissions and a dynamic mechanism of adoption and abandon.

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Separation logic and language design

One way to present Mezzo would be to describe it as the first attempt to design a ML language on top of separation logic. Of course, that's a bit reductive: Mezzo's type system is inspired by separation logic rather than a direct translation of it, and ML influences makes it nicer than the program logics we usually see, intended for C-family languages. At the same time I'm always surprised that this had not been done before -- despite the copious amount of research that is done on concurrent separation logics these days.