2026-07-20T05:38:23Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:18232 2024-03-06T11:01:27Z ddc:004 open_access

Rust for Morello: Always-On Memory Safety, Even in Unsafe Code (Experience Paper) Harris, Sarah Cooksey, Simon Vollmer, Michael Batty, Mark Compilers Rust Memory Safety CHERI Memory safety issues are a serious concern in systems programming. Rust is a systems language that provides memory safety through a combination of a static checks embodied in the type system and ad hoc dynamic checks inserted where this analysis becomes impractical. The Morello prototype architecture from ARM uses capabilities, fat pointers augmented with object bounds information, to catch failures of memory safety. This paper presents a compiler from Rust to the Morello architecture, together with a comparison of the performance of Rust’s runtime safety checks and the hardware-supported checks of Morello. The cost of Morello’s always-on memory safety guarantees is 39% in our 19 benchmark suites from the Rust crates repository (comprising 870 total benchmarks). For this cost, Morello’s capabilities ensure that even unsafe Rust code benefits from memory safety guarantees. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Sarah Harris and Simon Cooksey and Michael Vollmer and Mark Batty 2023 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 263, 37th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2023) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.39 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-182322 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.39 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode