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i2talics • today at 4:55 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

The tricky thing about formalization is that you usually have to reimplement the type checker into a proof assistant in order to do formal soundness proofs. It's not necessarily clear that this reimplementation is identical to the actual Rust compiler (in fact, you often have to massively simplify the type system to make the proofs tractable), so bugs in implementation can cause unsoundness without being related to fundamental flaws in the soundness of the type system.


Replies

afdbcreid • today at 5:12 PM

Indeed. Proving the implementation will likely never be done, it's just way too hard. But proving Rust abstract semantics are sound will by itself be a major leap forward (RustBelt did that for a subset of Rust).