Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Programmers learning Rust 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. First, we studied Rust developers’ misconceptions of ownership to create the Ownership Inventory, a new instrument for measuring a person’s knowledge of ownership. We found that Rust learners could not connect Rust’s static and dynamic semantics, such as determining why an ill-typed program would (or would not) exhibit undefined behavior. Second, we created a conceptual model of Rust’s semantics that explains borrow checking in terms of flow-sensitive permissions on paths into memory. Third, we implemented a Rust compiler plugin that visualizes programs under the model. Fourth, we integrated the permissions model and visualizations into a broader pedagogy of ownership by writing a new ownership chapter for The Rust Programming Language , a popular Rust textbook. Fifth, we evaluated an initial deployment of our pedagogy against the original version, using reader responses to the Ownership Inventory as a point of comparison. Thus far, the new pedagogy has improved learner scores on the Ownership Inventory by an average of 9
DOI: 10.1145/3622841
Authors: Will Crichton, Gavin Gray, Shriram Krishnamurthi
Institutions: Brown University, ETH Zurich
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Science Applications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W4386614515