flowistry VS prusti-dev

https://github.com/willcrichton/flowistry https://github.com/cognitive-engineering-lab/aquascope

Hello Rustaceans, the same lab that has brought you The Rust Book Experiment, Aquascope, and Flowistry is starting a new endeavor. We want to understand when Rust's trait system makes it hard for you to understand or debug a Rust program.

I'm personally excited about building developer tools with a sophisticated understanding of your Rust programs. So I've worked on tools like Flowistry and Aquascope.

Maybe this vscode extension could be useful to you?

Maybe you would be interested in flowistry?

Quick, easy formal verification tools that programmers can use on the spot from the IDE are hard to make for most languages because most languages and their compilers weren't made with such thing in mind.

I guess Rust might be heading somewhere interesting with tooling, with tools like Flowistry existing (https://github.com/willcrichton/flowistry) showing what is possible. It's a plugin that can compute backwards / forwards static slices for you, straight in the IDE as a VSCode plugin. I think you need an external program that runs a full program analysis to do the same in C++.

Based on how Flowistry works I think this should be possible.

> The overall goal would be to figure out classical error conditions like nill pointers deference.

> If I can figure out if a pointer will be nil in some execution branch, there is no reason why a computer cannot do the same.

Note, this is called flow-sensitive typing (also called type narrowing) and I think that typescript does it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-sensitive_typing

> I personally would see this as an human race level upgrades. Imagine feeding your code to a CI that spit back something like: "you will have a panic at line 156 when your input is > 4"

A model checker can do that!

See this

https://model-checking.github.io/kani/tutorial-kinds-of-fail...

Other techniques are also possible

https://github.com/viperproject/prusti-dev#quick-example

(Here I could link a lot of things, I just selected two Rust projects to illustrate)

This works better if you are able to provide contracts in your API that says which guarantees you provide. Alternatively, asserts are useful too.

You might be interested in the Prusti project, which statically checks for absence of reachable panics, overflows etc. It also allows user-defined specifications such as pre and post-conditions, loop body invariants, termination checking and so on.

https://github.com/viperproject/prusti-dev

This is called refinement types and prusti might be the project you saw.

But there's also a lot of exciting work around formal verification like Prusti.

prusti

Efforts: seL4, Project Everest, the Prossimo project of the ISRG, Let's Encrypt, and Prusti for the Rust language

Wow that sounds really cool! I'm not an expert but does that mean that one day you could implement dependend types or refinement types in Rust as a crate ? I currently only know of tools like: Flux Creusot Kani Prusti