Verona

About Verona

Project Verona is a research initiative by Microsoft Research focused on creating a new programming language for secure infrastructure programming. The project was first detailed in late 2019 and was made open source on GitHub in January 2020. Verona is a collaborative effort between Microsoft Research and academic institutions, including Imperial College London and Uppsala University. Key individuals associated with the project include Microsoft researchers like Matthew Parkinson, Sylvan Clebsch, and Matthew Johnson. The primary goal of Project Verona is to explore language and runtime design for safe, scalable memory management and compartmentalization. It addresses the pervasive issue of memory safety vulnerabilities, which have historically accounted for a significant percentage of security flaws in software. Verona introduces the concept of 'concurrent ownership,' a model where ownership is based on groups of objects rather than single objects, differentiating it from languages like Rust, which was a source of inspiration alongside Pony and Cyclone. The language is designed from a clean slate to allow for deep exploration without the constraints of backward compatibility. Project Verona is not a commercial product but a research vehicle intended to generate academic findings and new ideas for developing secure systems. The focus is on creating secure foundations for modern cloud infrastructure. The runtime is implemented in C++, allowing for the low-level system access required to manage memory and concurrency abstractions safely. The research aims to answer fundamental questions about building scalable memory management by designing a language without concurrent mutation and using language-level regions to support compartmentalization.