Back at Mozilla

After my internship last year has ended, I naturally became somewhat less active in the Rust community as I could not work on Rust full-time any more. Well, for the following months I am going to be back full-time. :) Thanks to @aturon, I am able to work as a research assistant for Mozilla during this summer (until the end of November). I don’t really know what a “research assistant” is, but I am going to continue the work on Rust memory models, and hopefully also have some time to make progress on union semantics.

After exploring a “validity”-based model last year, I am going to be looking at an “access”-based model this year. That’s the kind of model @arielb1, @ubsan and others have been proposing, and I am going to build on top of their work and hopefully come up with something we can actually implement a checker for (staying true to the vision I laid out previously that we should have an executable operational semantics for MIR, including its undefined behavior). Expect a blog post soon for what I mean by “validity”-based vs. “alias”-based, and for a first draft of such an “access”-based model.

Until then, stay tuned!