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<p><div style="text-align: center">
<img src="static/Aeneas.jpg"
     alt="Iapyx removing arrowhead from Aeneas" title="Iapyx removing arrowhead from Aeneas"
     style=""/>
<figcaption>
Unknown author, <i>Iapyx removing arrowhead from Aeneas</i> [Fresco].
Wall in Pompei, digital image from Michael Lahanis.
<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1357010">Source</a>
</figcaption>
</div></p>

# Aeneas

Aeneas is a verification toolchain for Rust programs.  It relies on a translation from Rusts's MIR
internal language to a pure lamdba calculus.  It is intended to be used in combination with
[Charon](https://github.com/Kachoc/charon), which compiles Rust programs to an intermediate
representation called LLBC. It currently has a backend for the [F\*](https://www.fstar-lang.org)
theorem prover, and we intend to add backends for other provers such as
[Coq](https://coq.inria.fr/), [HOL4](https://hol-theorem-prover.org/) or
[LEAN](https://leanprover.github.io/).

## Project Structure

- `src`: the OCaml sources. Note that we rely on [Dune](https://github.com/ocaml/dune)
  to build the project.
- `fstar`: F\* files providing basic definitions and notations for the
  generated code (basic definitions for arithmetic types and operations,
  collections like vectors, etc.).
- `tests`: files generated by applying Aeneas on some of the test files of Charon,
  completed with hand-written files (proof scripts, mostly).
- `rust-tests`: miscelleanous files, to test the semantics of Rust or generate
  code in a one-shot manner (mostly used for the arithmetic definitions, for
  instance to generate `MIN` and `MAX` constants for all the integer types
  supported by Rust).

## Installation & Build

You need to install OCaml, together with some packages.

We suggest you to follow those [instructions](https://ocaml.org/docs/install.html),
and install OPAM on the way (same instructions).

We use **OCaml 4.13.1**: `opam switch create 4.13.1+options`

The dependencies can then be installed with the following command:

```
opam install ppx_deriving visitors easy_logging zarith yojson core_unix odoc
```

Finally, building the project simply requires to run `make` in the top directory.

## Usage

The simplest way to run Aeneas is to execute `dune exec -- src/main.exe [OPTIONS] LLBC_FILE`,
where `LLBC_FILE` is an .llbc file generated by Charon.

Aeneas provides a lot of flags and options to tweak its behaviour: you can use `--help`
to display a detailed documentation.

## Targeted Subset And Current Limitations

We target **safe** Rust.

We have the following limitations, that we plan to address one by one:

- **no loops**: ongoing work. We are currently working on a "join" operation on
  environments to address this issue.
- **no functions pointers/closures/traits**: ongoing work.
- **limited type parametricity**: it is not possible for now to instantiate a type
  parameter with a type containing a borrow. This is mostly an engineering
  issue. We intend to quickly address the issue for types (i.e., allow `Option<&mut T>`),
  and later address it for functions (i.e., allow `f<&mut T>` - we consider this to
  be less urgent).
- **no nested borrows in function signatures**: ongoing work.
- **no interior mutability**: long-term effort. Interior mutability introduces
  true aliasing: we will probably have to use a low-level memory model to address
  this issue.
  Note that interior mutability is truely necessary for concurrent execution (it
  is exploited to implement the synchronisation primitives).
- **no concurrent execution**: long-term effort. We plan to address coarse-grained
  parallelism as a long-term goal.

## Formalization

The translation has been formalized and published at ICFP2022: [Aeneas: Rust
verification by functional
translation](https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3547647)
([long version](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07185)).