Modular Responsiveness Verification of Rust Async Runtimes

Abstract

Asynchronous (async) programming is a popular paradigm for managing concurrency. Languages that provide async support typically have a runtime to manage asynchronous executions. These runtimes are critical infrastructure, yet verifying them has received little attention. One reason is that a property that users care most about from an async runtime is a liveness property: tasks submitted to the runtime eventually make progress. Verifying liveness is challenging for libraries that are both concurrent and highly optimized. We present a lightweight and modular proof technique for verifying eventual progression guarantees for Rust async runtimes. We describe this technique in the context of a simple language based on Rust and Rust's async model. We then realize this proof technique as a set of static analyses for Rust and use these to verify eventual progression of several key components of multiple Rust async runtime implementations.