Crichton, Gray, And Krishnamurthi’s Work On Ownership Types In Rust Has Been Named A SIGPLAN Research Highlight
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on March 4, 2025
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) explores programming language concepts and tools. It designates a handful of high-quality papers with broad appeal from its sponsored conferences as SIGPLAN Research Highlights. Last month, SIGPLAN chose 2023 work by forthcoming Brown CS faculty member Will Crichton, doctoral student Gavin Gray (formerly at ETH Zürich), and faculty member Shriram Krishnamurthi as one of four Research Highlights papers from the 2021-2023 period.
“Programmers learning Rust,” the authors explain, “struggle to understand ownership types, Rust’s core mechanism for ensuring memory safety without garbage collection. This paper describes our attempt to systematically design a pedagogy for ownership types.”
Their work (“A Grounded Conceptual Model for Ownership Types in Rust”) offers the Ownership Inventory, a new instrument for measuring a person’s knowledge of ownership; a conceptual model of Rust’s semantics; a Rust compiler plugin that visualizes programs under the model; an integration of the conceptual model and visualization into a broader pedagogy of ownership, resulting in a new chapter for The Rust Programming Language, a popular textbook; and an evaluation of an initial deployment of their pedagogy against the original version, demonstrating learner scores on ownership-related questions that improved by an average of 9%.
A full list of SIGPLAN Research Highlight papers is available here.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.
