Josephine: Using JavaScript to safely manage the lifetimes of Rust data

Abstract

This paper is about the interface between languages which use a garbage collector and those which use fancy types for safe manual memory management. Garbage collection is the traditional memory management scheme for functional languages, whereas type systems are now used for memory safety in imperative languages. We use existing techniques for linear capabilities to provide safe access to copyable references, but the application to languages with a tracing garbage collector, and to data with explicit lifetimes is new. This work is related to mixed linear/non-linear programming, but the languages being mixed are Rust and JavaScript.