Project Verona

Project Verona: a programming language for the modern cloud

Adoption of the cloud requires trust, but software vulnerabilities can quickly erode that trust. There is a real drive in the industry to make memory safety vulnerabilities a thing of the past. Project Verona is a highly ambitious research project to make that a reality for the infrastructure we build for the cloud. The research combines world-class research on compilers, programming language semantics and type systems to the design of Project Verona. We aim to provide the secure foundations we need for trusting the cloud.

Project Verona is a research project being run by Microsoft Research in collaboration with Imperial College London and Uppsala University. We are exploring research around language and runtime design for safe scalable memory management and compartmentalisation. The core research questions, we hope to address are:

• 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?