Memory Safe Language Design & Verification

Abstract

Memory related bugs are among the most critical sources of software vulnerabilities in modern computing systems. Issues like buffer overflows, dangling pointers, null dereferencing, and data races frequently result in system crashes, unpredictable behavior, and serious security threats. Traditional programming languages such as C and C++ offer high performance but provide little or no built-in protection against unsafe memory operations. Recently, memory safe languages such as Rust, Go, Swift, and managed languages like Java have gained significant attention because they enforce safety guarantees at compile time or runtime. Along with language design, formal verification and static analysis methods are also being adopted to ensure memory correctness. This paper presents a detailed review of memory safe language design principles and verification techniques used to eliminate memory errors. It discusses ownership models, borrow checking, garbage collection, type systems, and formal methods for proving memory safety. A comparative analysis of popular memory safe languages is also presented. The paper also highlights how verification tools and proof assistants are used for checking correctness. Some limitations and future research directions are discussed as well.

KEYWORDS: Memory safety, Rust, ownership model, formal verification, static analysis, garbage collection, type systems, borrow checker, safe programming languages.