VRLifeTime - An IDE Tool to Avoid Concurrency and Memory Bugs in Rust

Abstract

As a young programming language designed for systems software development, Rust aims to provide safety guarantees like high-level languages and performance efficiency like low-level languages. Lifetime is a core concept in Rust, and it is key to both safety checks and automated resource management conducted by the Rust compiler. However, Rust's lifetime rules are very complex. In reality, it is not uncommon that Rust programmers fail to infer the correct lifetime, causing severe concurrency and memory bugs. In this paper, we present VRLifeTime, an IDE tool that can visualize lifetime for Rust programs and help programmers avoid lifetime-related mistakes. Moreover, VRLifeTime can help detect some lifetime-related bugs (i.e., double locks) with detailed debugging information. A demo video is available at https://youtu.be/L5F_XCOrJTQ.