Current status

Polonius has been provisionally integrated into rustc. You can run a nightly rustc with the -Zpolonius flag to try it out. However, it is not really ready for widespread use.

Our current roadmap is as follows:

• Complete the analysis: Polonius represents only a portion of the full borrow checker analysis. We would like to move as much as possible from the handwritten Rust code in rustc into the datalog-based approach of polonius.
• Optimize: Naively implementing the polonius rules can be quite slow, so it's important that we optimize the rules and produce a more optimized version. This will also likely require some special case optimizations to help with specific cases, such as large static constants.

After those two steps are done, and presuming all goes well, we expect to replace the existing rustc borrow checker with the polonius crate. The crate will continue to exist.

Want to help?

Check out the polonius working group of the compiler team.