Building Bridges: Safe Interactions with Foreign Languages through Omniglot
summary
Omniglot enforces Rust soundness when calling unmodified C libraries by interposing on the FFI, validating values at call boundaries and tracking foreign pointers with a new type/state system that binds references to allocation and access scopes. Implementations target Linux userspace using x86 memory protection keys and a constrained embedded kernel; evaluation shows direct-memory interaction beats IPC/serialization (Sandrust) and isolation dominates overheads, with Omniglot adding only about 0–5% additional cost while preserving memory and type safety.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Memory safety in systems
- 1:25Legacy Rust rewrites
- 2:28Unsafe FFI risks
- 3:52Validating foreign values
- 8:27Mutable aliasing prevention
- 14:05Omniglot’s type system
- 15:09Omniglot in real systems
- 16:35Summary
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