C-rusted: The Advantages of Rust, in C, without the Disadvantages

TL;DR

C-rusted introduces a method to annotate C programs with ownership, resource, and type information, enabling static analysis to prevent many errors while maintaining compatibility with standard C toolchains.

Contribution

It presents a novel annotation system for C that enhances static analysis capabilities without requiring changes to existing compilation tools.

Findings

Annotations enable static detection of resource and type errors.

Annotated code can be verified for correctness using existing C compilers.

The approach reduces runtime errors and security vulnerabilities.

Abstract

C-rusted is an innovative technology whereby C programs can be (partly) annotated so as to express: ownership, exclusivity and shareability of language, system and user-defined resources; dynamic properties of objects and the way they evolve during program execution; nominal typing and subtyping. The (partially) annotated C programs can be translated with unmodified versions of any compilation toolchain capable of processing ISO C code. The annotated C program parts can be validated by static analysis: if the static analyzer flags no error, then the annotations are provably coherent among themselves and with respect to annotated C code, in which case said annotated parts are provably exempt from a large class of logic, security, and run-time errors.