Corundum: statically-enforced persistent memory safety
Morteza Hoseinzadeh, Steven Swanson · 2021
Fast, byte-addressable, persistent main memories (PM) make it possible to build complex data structures that can survive system failures. Programming for PM is challenging, not least because it combines well-known programming challenges like locking, memory management, and pointer safety with novel PM-specific bug types. It also requires logging updates to PM to facilitate recovery after a crash. A misstep in any of these areas can corrupt data, leak resources, or prevent successful recovery after a crash. Existing PM libraries in a variety of languages -- C, C++, Java, Go -- simplify some of these problems, but they still require the programmer to learn (and flawlessly apply) complex rules to ensure correctness. Opportunities for data-destroying bugs abound.