Memory safety is a critical challenge in addressing security attacks. Most security vulnerabilities in systems code are caused by memory safety bugs in memory-unsafe languages like C and C++. The solution is to move to memory-safe languages. An important aspect of moving is creating a path for incremental adoption. There are billion of lines of C and C++ code, and memory-safe code must interoperate with C and C++ code without undermining memory-safety guarantees.

In this talk, we will describe why memory-safe interoperation is important and discuss open research problems related to it. We will describe work we have been doing on memory-safe interoperation, specifically building support for Swift code to interoperate with C and C++ code in a safe and ergonomic manner. Swift is Apple’s choice for a memory safe language. Annotations are used to bridge the gaps between Swift and C and C++, communicating safety contracts on the interfaces. We will cover our annotations to date and opportunities for further research.