Microsoft announces Verona, Rust-inspired programming language

A month ago, Microsoft researcher Matthew Parkinson mentioned that Microsoft is developing a new Rust-based programming language, and the project is named Verona. Now, Microsoft has officially announced Verona.

Based on the presentation from Microsoft, the Verona project aims to explore research on language and runtime design for secure and scalable memory management and partitioning. The open-source prototype only covers memory management.

There are several areas we are investigating in Project Verona. A few of the high-level questions are here:

• If we design a language without concurrent mutation, can we build scalable memory management?
• Can linear regions be used to remove the restrictions of per-object linearity without sacrificing memory management?
• Can language level regions be used to support compartmentalisations?

Microsoft also emphasized that this is just a research project, not a product, and has nothing to do with Microsoft’s use of C ++, C #, and Rust. They hope that the Verona research project will benefit other languages, and they hope to use it as a “research programming language” to attract more academic collaborators to explore the concept of concurrent ownership through open source. Currently, the project is not ready for use outside of research.