Safe Low-Level Code Without Overhead is Practical

Abstract

Developers write low-level systems code in unsafe programming languages due to performance concerns. The lack of safety causes bugs and vulnerabilities that safe languages avoid. We argue that safety without run-time overhead is possible through type invariants that prove the safety of potentially unsafe operations. We empirically show that Rust and C# can be extended with such features to implement safe network device drivers without run-time overhead, and that Ada has these features already.